


of Wrong Times and Wrong Places

by lowlaif



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (i'm basically just running on unhealthy coping mechanisms and spite), AH YES i almost forgot, Angst, Depression, Self-Loathing, Slow Burn, Swearing, You get the drill..., a knife! :D, actually a whole lotta dark themes despite overall tone of tags, but this was supposed to be 1k words at MOST, dumbass humor, i also do not know how i pulled that mixture off tbh, i can't actually stop you, i'm having a full conversation with myself in the tags are u SURE u wanna read this?, i'm just a red flag, non-gender-specified!Reader, noooooooooooooooooooooo, reader what's in ur pants?, the goddamn apocalypse, this fic is literally named "wrong times and places" what the shit did u expect?, well go on i guess, which tells you a lot about the state of mind i'm currently in, whoop there it is!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:14:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27190259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lowlaif/pseuds/lowlaif
Summary: So, to recap:1. He had fallen in love with you.2. He had seen you die.3. He had found you again, and you were alive!All of that sounded very neat, but there was a single problem gnawing on your mind while a kind-hearted pedestrian yanked you down for cover in fear of another gunshot. Just a teeny-tiny little inconsistency with his story.4. You did not, in fact, know the man.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy)/Reader
Comments: 19
Kudos: 94





	of Wrong Times and Wrong Places

**May 6, 1937**

**00:00**

It looked like he was going to kill someone today too.

Don't misunderstand, it wasn't like the guilt over his pending actions would drown him in self-hatred, there was no sense of morality that shackled him to any form of useless remorse over snuffing out innocent lives. The only (irrelevant) problem was that he felt a bit uncomfortable with the thought of you finding out what he had done the day he managed to find his way back into your arms, thus causing you to turn your back to him, shunning him for everything he had done in his selfish desire to take his single piece of goodness back. The thought that you might never look him in the eyes again made something in his stomach clench painfully.

But as long as those eyes existed, he did not particularly care.

"One day you'll have to choose," the offensively blonde woman next to him said before handing him his latest assignment. "You'll have to choose between them and the world."

Five did not spare the Handler a single glance.

"I've made my decision."

**December 12, 2016**

**12:22**

You fought with your ridiculously big shawl (which could've passed off as a carpet by the sheer size of it) and snorted at the song resonating through your headphones as the singer urged a boy to go run much more often than anyone should be running in your humble opinion, dashing down the slippery wintery streets despite your aversion towards anything and everything resembling sports because you were so late that not even a race-time putting Usain Bolt to shame would manage to save your tardy ass from another round of detention this month. Evading a flock of pedestrians, who were shooting you dirty looks for what amounted to be an attempt at securing your own emotional soundness, you begged whatever higher being decided to take pity on you that you wouldn't miss the last bus to school since another two hours of Mrs. Tristis's afterschool supervision would literally force you to ugly-cry, and no one wanted to witness that. No one. Not even god, you were sure.

But in a disembodied answer to your heartfelt plea — or thanks to your glorious luck, there was no way to be sure — you managed to stumble into one of the taller hills of snow gathered on the sidewalk, which immediately translated into soggy socks and freezing toes although this pair of shoes was supposedly waterproof. You could feel the omnipotent narrator you had begged for a tiny amount of additional time waving its otherworldly-equivalent of a middle finger in your approximate direction when you saw the vehicle of your dreams and nightmares pull up into a station that was — despite your best attempts at Nordic-walking — still more than a good half minute’s worth of sprint out of reach.

Crap!

You bolted forward as the refrain of the song sat in again, a husky male voice instructing you to run, boy, run, your legs pumping out beneath you. There was a slight possibility that you could make it. As unlikely as it was, the chance truly existed until there was a blue light flashing in the corner of your eye.

Startled, you managed to slip on an icy patch of pavement and fell ass-first into another snow mound that was painted in a suspicious mixture of some drunkard's yellow and a gross, muddy brown, which would both definitely leave their stain on your new beige overcoat. Wrinkling your nose in disgust, you looked up at the same second that your bus sped away with a tiny little somewhat cute stutter.

Crap indeed.

In that exact moment, you hated the 12th December with passion, convinced that you'd never forget this day for the atrocious slight it committed against you. You swore that you would kick the driver the next time he dared to come around and melt every bit of frost lining the streets with a self-made flamethrower (even though you had no capabilities that would enable you to build such a weapon whatsoever). However, in actuality, you would have long forgotten all about that incident as soon as you got back to the orphanage, and some shitheaded kids commenced the grand finale of your day by shoving your head into the uncleaned (!!!) toilet on the third floor that was usually frequented by that one janitor that only ever seemed to eat spicy food.

Yeah, the 12th December of 2017 was just another of the otherwise uneventful, yet still pretty shitty days of your life. Nothing all that interesting happened, and nothing all that interesting would happen for a long time after that either.

Well, maybe except for the time you broke out into a fit of less than pretty, frustrated sobs when you unwillingly synced up with Mrs. Tristis's feelings and got hit by the latest onslaught of self-loathing and burn-out that had begun corroding her insides so much that you didn't even have to touch her to feel it.

Fucking empathy.

**August 12, 2019**

**12:12**

You pulled at the handle of your bag, yanking it back up over your shoulder for the umpteenth time while you hummed along to the song resonating through your headphones, dodging little groups of people gathered on the sidewalk because apparently, no one knew how to not inconvenience others by blocking an entire street, fucking dipshits.

Unfortunately, running was off the table for now because you would probably knock into someone and star a subpar human version of the dominoes game, but the singer made it seem so tempting that you almost broke into a run for no apparent reason, even despite your obstinate aversion towards anything resembling sports. The dull pain in your head managed to stop you in the nick of time, though, halting your movements before you could actually begin randomly running around like a lunatic.

Your day was over. You were headed back home. No need to start jogging under the scorching ministrations of August’s ridiculous summer-sun, thank you very much, you currently did not want to suffer a heat-stroke and faint in the middle of The City.

Whatever inventive genius had decided to name this city _The City_. No creativity at all. God.

A woman brushed up against you and you felt elated for a second, excitedly jittery prior to your pending date that you’d spent hours needlessly worrying upon although you were quite sure your liaison liked you, too. Then the contact was broken and the sensation gone, quickly overshadowed by the giant cloud of gloom following behind a high schooler that had apparently gotten an abysmal grade on a test he had actually studied for, and you cursed yourself alongside him, wishing your brain wouldn’t uselessly remember the lines of your favorite movies instead of the chemical formulas you kept repeating to yourself, until he also passed you by, and the love that a street musician to your side felt for their music flowed into your heart so wantonly it made your thoughts swim.

That useless power of yours had already given you enough of a headache earlier that day while you had been perched together with peers your age which had no control over their hormones _or_ sudden mood swings, but now, in the middle of mid-day traffic, it was practically killing you, drilling into the last bit of your remaining energy to suck it dry. You tried your best to drown out everything by concentrating on the music that was blasting through your ears, barely noticing how you had been listening to the same song on repeat, but emotions weren’t easily suppressed, and the streets and people were brimming with them right now, most of the pedestrians around you stressed, or exhausted, or hungry, or too late for some incredibly important gathering that would probably survive without their presence.

There were odd ones out, of course, the occasional incandescently happy one, and a handful of strangers who were riding high on the hormones of love. However, even those rather pleasant feelings only added to your headache, making the dull pain turn into a sharper one. A migraine was the last thing you needed right now, so you tried to walk a bit faster, tried to escape a power you had never been able to shake once during your entire life.

That's when you were blinded by a flash of color and crashed into someone that definitely hadn’t been there a second ago — which wouldn’t have been all that unusual considering the crazy afternoon traffic if it weren’t for the fact that he literally dropped out of thin air, falling from a good foot above the ground straight into little unsuspecting you. The quality of his muscles made it hard to differentiate between solid rock and actual human flesh, and you just kinda bounced off him, which should’ve — in theory — landed you on your face, but a hand darted out to seize your wrist before you could share a deep kiss with the flagstone, steadying you although it felt like the world was about to give out beneath your feet.

Kudos to him for catching you. He'd been the one floating after all.

Pure, conditioned reflex instantly placed a >thank you< on the tip of your tongue, but before you could even attempt to voice it, the skin contact he’d accidentally established made your pupils blow so hard anyone with half a brain would assume you were a junkie that had just gotten their hit. All rational thoughts were flung out of your mind as if a grenade exploded in there. You powers purred in delight and latched onto him in a frenzy.

Hadn’t you been an empath, you might've noticed the scary scowl on his face — an expression so coldly furious that it was deadly in a very impersonal way, deadly like a streetlight if you managed to crash your car into it. Or maybe, your first realization would’ve been how heavy the scent of blood was on him, how vivid the splashes of crimson on a suit that didn’t quite fit his age but nonetheless nicely highlighted his somewhat angular features, his jawline seemingly designed with a ruler to guarantee every line and edge was flawlessly sculpted, measured up to the closest centimeter to a predetermined lenght. You might’ve discerned how handsome he was, thick eyebrows and eyes so sharp they could’ve cut through glass, or how he was a good head taller than you, or how warm he was, or how he had no trouble holding you on your feet with only one hand, but all of that just kinda passed you by as said hand curled around your naked wrist and triggered your abilities into overdrive. Everything you kept a careful hold on straight-up launched into space. Emotions came crashing down like water through a broken pipe, and it felt like it was leaking into a tiny box with you locked inside.

At first, he was just averagely pissed, slightly annoyed at an inconvenience. As per usual, there was a mixture of emotions waiting for you when the bond caught: Weariness and tension and adrenaline pouring themselves together to form one shitty temper to be in, and your mood instantly soured in empathy when you felt the telltale hues of depression rearing their ugly heads to greet you like an old friend beneath the mixture of it all. He was an incredible combination of negativity and really inappropriate dark humor that only faded a little when he felt something you could only describe as >ugh< over having run into you, which, same, he didn't have to be such a whiny bitch about it.

Then he began contemplating whether to belatedly let you drop onto your ass.

Seriously, what a jerk.

That little intermezzo would’ve been jarring enough, an unwanted stream of consciousness forcing images and noises and sounds and sensations and thoughts down a connection you neither anticipated nor wanted. The dude who was shoving it all down your throat ( _that's what she said_ ) didn't even know he was doing it, which only made this moment that more uncomfortable with its latent voyeristic aftertaste. The entire situation reminded you of that one incident when your worst orphanage-roomie had yanked you back by your hair and watched another kid pour sewage into your mouth. But that one had been intentional, and those brats had been goddamn psychopaths, getting sidetracked, moving on, point being that no matter how uncomfortable you were right now, you were used to much, much worse.

Ok, his inner workings might've been admittedly dark, and most impulses rushing down the established bond towards you fairly homicidal, but many people had some murderous tendencies they would never act upon, so it wasn't all that difficult to ignore how his serial-killer-like-fantasies were less imagination than memory-based estimates. This had nothing to do with you. You would just make sure to get out of his way before you got your neck broken. Again, this didn't concern you at all, you were just watching a convincing yet unskillfully edited movie. Fantasy. Not reality. It was all just in his head.

Then he lowered that head to look at you. A solid second passed. His eyes widened in recognition. Every remotely coherent emotion got brutally hurled aside by absolute haywire, memories exploding around you in an inconceivable mess that almost blasted you straight out of your own mind, and you lost whatever little breath you had managed to gather in your lungs.

Happiness, so pure it blinded you, soon overshadowed by grief so profound you felt your heart stop in sympathy. Then there was anger, mostly directed at himself, hatred so obsessive it seeped into your bones and more anger, now aimed at everybody else, a sliver of relief, a punch to the gut of goddamn desperation, and last but not least honest, helpless, crazed love that made you double take because _what the fuck_ , almost immediately drowned out by hope that was soon crushed by trauma and so many different things that you couldn’t possibly name all of them or even realize you were feeling them before they faded into a whole other emotion already. They flashed through your chest as he experienced them, and man, did this guy have to be unstable because you got whiplash, unwillingly synchronized to his madness while he kept skipping through emotions faster than you shuffled through songs in your least favorite playlist.

And yet, even that would’ve been ok. You could've dealt with it somehow. It would’ve been the most extreme, most jarring bond you’d ever shared, but it would’ve been ok, because in the end, those emotions had jack all to do with you, he was just losing his mind and you were unfortunately forced to witness it.

However, underlying, almost feeding that train-wreck of his emotions were memories, and you could tell these were memories because fantasies born through imagination always held a glimmer of a lie, but these memories were blunt in their truth and filled with your voice, the strange little sounds you made when giggling too hard and the soft grunts that would rush out of your throat whenever you snuggled up at him in your sleep. They were overflowing with your smiles, the pretty ones, too, but foremost the half amused and completely disgusted grins that made your features contort in a strange way, which you definitely didn’t find as charming as he did. You saw your tears, how they tasted in laughter and sadness and how you usually tried to hide them from him which, again, with feeling, _what the fuck?!_ , and there was something about a mannequin, off equations, stuff concerning burning buildings and the displaced image of you absolutely trashing the room of one of your former orphanage-mates, which you would’ve accepted as one of your own delusions if it weren’t for the fact that this random guy was clearly remembering you hurling a sledge-hammer at a dresser with so much delight that you instantly began worrying what other kinks he had if _this_ particular memory turned him on to this extent.

That man, whoever he was, had you wrapped up in this storm with him, pieces of memory flashing by like debris as the wind of his emotions threatened to sweep you away. You got dragged into another mindfuck and another mindfuck and another mindfuck and into the sheer unbelievable relief of getting to see you again which, thirds a charm, _WHAT THE FUCK?!,_ what was happening here, what had you missed and how could you get off this ride?

You couldn't notice the look in his eyes, didn't have the mental capacity left to deal with your own perception of reality, and that's why you missed how the look shifted when he realized that something was missing, his strange hope suddenly extinguished by despair so groundless it made you shiver in pain. You heard the horrible gasp alongside him, it punched both of you square in the chest and robbed your breath, tailed by the sight of thick liquid, wet, gross, and warm on his skin, a sickeningly sweet scent emanating from where he had brushed aside your hair with trembling hands. You wanted to hurl your guts out and couldn't for the life of yourself tell whether that urge was yours or his, the most vivid and put-together thing he'd felt in the past four seconds so coherent in its incoherency that it burned itself into your mind like a flame would leave a black smudge on cheap film stock.

This asshole was literally forcing a live-feed of you dying in his arms into your very unwilling brain.

Fuck.

Witnessing yourself kick the bucket in another person's memories was decidedly the most messed up thing this unnecessary too-cheap-for-a-thrift-store how-do-we-fuck-over-their-life-before-they’re-born power had ever done to you. Especially considering that you felt what he had felt in that moment, and man, that stuff was nothing short of torture. No sentient being should ever have to go through something like that.

Well, its a good thing that it wasn't really _you_ dying in his arms. _You_ had a scar on your left eyebrow. Whoever he remembered hadn't.

You broke off the contact in shock, reeling backward into another pedestrian that immediately told you to watch where you were going and instinctively got flipped off in return. That man was still staring at you, not because the bond had been reciprocated but because he apparently knew a "you" and had apparently watched that "you" die, which probably was a little traumatic considering how much he apparently _loved_ "you", go figure, and he was staring at you so hard that a part of your brain began wondering whether you were actually wearing clothes or just standing there stark naked. And also, all of this happened in the duration of one blink of an eye. Huh.

He opened his mouth to tell you something, anything, and you were deadly curious about what on earth he intended to say right now, maybe he'd ask you whether you were here often, or welcome you to chillis, but before a single syllable left his mouth, a gunshot whizzed past and he spazzed out into a flash of blue before reappearing another step closer to you, so near that you could feel his breath brush against your forehead. People screamed and scattered. A panic broke out, not that your empathy caught on to much of it, being too preoccupied with _him_. He didn't seem to mind that a bullet had been trained on his head a second prior, and you didn't either, still stuck in the aftermath of participating in the worst dia-show ever that anticlimactically ended with your death.

Mystery-guy made an aborted move, like he was going to brush the knuckles of his left hand against your jaw, but a nearby crashing-sound startled him out of it.

“Shit”, that man hissed under his breath, more of a short bark than an actual word, and he let go of you before diving into the mass of people and disappearing into that beautiful shade of blue, one last lingering gaze aimed back to where you stood.

Yeah. _Shit._

You were left standing there, wondering why he hadn't pulled you to him like he so desperately wanted to, and why you weren't happy that he hadn't, and what on earth just happened, and if you really sounded like a dying hyena whenever you laughed out loud because holy fucking shit, you’d never laugh again.

Then you got thrown back into reality and into the moment and once more you just thought _what the fuck_ with about a dozen of exclamation points and question marks dancing behind your eyes, glad that the grim times back when a swear jar and your hard-earned chore-nickles had existed alongside your sailor's mouth had long since passed.

So, to recap:

1\. He had fallen in love with you.

2\. He had seen you die.

3\. He had found you again, and you were alive!

All of that sounded very neat, but there was a single problem gnawing on your mind while a kind-hearted pedestrian yanked you down for cover in fear of another gunshot. Just a teeny-tiny little inconsistency with his story.

4\. You did not, in fact, know the man.

The song in your headphones cut off and was replaced by what you instantly recognized as the first few beats to Elton John's _Can you Feel the Love Tonight_.

Lying there, listening to it, you decided that you really hated whatever celestial creature was responsible for this bullshit.

**August 27, 2019**

**00:34**

The moon had been hanging around in the sky for a while now, doing nothing except for reflecting some light it hadn't even produced itself onto earth. _(Lazy bastard.)_

Well ok, it admittedly did its job pretty well, considering the moonlight was so bright you almost missed the flash of color that died down in an alleyway on the other side of the street. For the duration of a single breath, you felt a waft of uncontained rage flitting over to you from where the blue had vanished before it got replaced by a rather grim form of contentment. You only knew one person that was capable of such an impersonal emotion, a person that was deadly like a streetlight if you managed to crash your car into it, and your curiosity was immediately piqued.

Teleportation-guy was back again.

Oh joy.

Something in you wanted to ignore his shenanigans and just leave, but you regrettably were unable to, even despite how nicely you had begun fooling yourself over the past few days, brushing off the telltale sound of air being sucked out from the vicinity and occasional sparks of turquoise in the corner of your eye as another present from your overtaxed mind. Although your supposed lover seldomly got close enough for your powers to launch into effect, it was pretty obvious he was following you by the way his stare was drilling a hole through the back of your head and presumably earth's upper layer of crust, which is why telling yourself that

_maybe, maybe the burning sensation on your upper neck was just a matter of you being paranoid,_

or that

_he was probably just a figment of your imagination fueled by a thousand fanfictions and even more sleepless, loveless nights,_

or your personal favorite

_he was way too handsome to be true,_

didn't quite cut it anymore.

Yeah, no. You couldn't keep lying, because you were shit at lying, and because acting like you did not know he was there was lying, and you were — jup, stressing it again — shit at that, even to yourself. He was most definitely there and most definitely very real because you weren't an empath for nothing and because the clusterfuck of his emotions could've generated enough electricity to power a small city.

Urgh.

Still pondering over how to delicately address his odd behavior or the rather personal insights you had gained to his past relationship with... erm... you?, you shuffled over to sneak a peek around the corner where you assumed he'd have to be, and unexpectedly got a front-row ticket to your putative boytoy punching the everloving shit out of another man that was half-heartedly attempting to defend himself, clearly not in the right state of mind to effectively do so anymore. You hadn't exactly been stealthy, but it seemed like both men were too preoccupied with one another to notice your belated arrival as you watched the scene in front of you with sudden and unwarranted enjoyment, slightly in awe over how your "lover" looked a lot scrawnier than his opponent (who presumably used femurs as toothpicks) and _still_ managed to dominate the other without breaking a sweat. Teleportation-guy now kicked the dodgy creep that you recognized as a patron who had kept cornering you at the diner during your night shifts and suddenly stopped one day after god-you-should-really-ask-for-his-name-'s uncoordinated appearance in your life. You hadn't really noticed, because first of all:

_You had had better things to worry about._

And second of all:

 _Teleportation-guy evidently had it under control_ (which you found in no way reassuring or arousing at all).

And when that embodied package of aggression was finally done beating his adversary up, his tiny little heap of grim contentment™ turned into a literal boulder of pride over a job well done that knocked you over the head when you realized that this goddamned idiot felt like he'd protected someone important to him and — newsflash — that _someone_ was you, which is why you had to reprimand yourself for swooning because this wasn't a romance musical from the nineties and he was a goddamn unarmed assailant

Thanks to your empathy being an illoyal whore, you also got to witness what the loser of this altercation felt, amused at how he did not quite understand why he had gotten struck all of a sudden and couldn't even move without flinching anymore, remaining slumped against the wall behind him bonelessly in an attempt to avoid another round of spanking. Teleportation-guy snorted at him, having aired out some of the frustration that had been ubiquitously clinging to his ~~broad~~ shoulders ( _Good for him._ ) and disappeared into another mirage of blue without even looking back once.

Jerk. He'd definitely noticed you were there.

Once more, you were left standing somewhere on your own like an idiot, trying to not look at the heap of beaten-up human with pity because that heap of beaten-up human probably would've attempted to knive you sooner or later. You failed and called an ambulance, honestly hoping this guy had some solid health insurance or at least better abilities at breaking out of hospitals than he had at fist-fights, staying as far from the man as possible because your "lover", who'd _just made a giant show out of his departure,_ was watching you from a roof and feeling jealous. Dumbass.

He kept "hidden" like that throughout the rest of your trudge home, which should’ve probably freaked you out a bit more now that you were thinking about it, but the worry wafting over to you in tiny amounts, closely chased by his annoyance at you having called an ambulance and at himself for acting like this somehow made you relish in his unorthodox company in a very odd, strangely un-reminiscent way.

Since you were convinced that he'd run off as soon as you locked the door behind you, you left it wide open, quickly shuffling into your kitchen and from there to the biggest window your apartment had to offer, placing a plate with some of your self-made bakeware and a cup of coffee — black, with a package of sugar and a carton of milk in reach — onto a railing that was meant to hold potted plants, hoping this would somehow make _you_ feel less bad about _his_ trauma.

He didn’t touch the sweets or the sweeteners. But the cup was empty by the time you checked on it.

**September 3, 2019**

**2:12**

It took about two weeks for you to fall into a rhythm with him, searching out his emotions intentionally instead of repressing them as you did with all the others, leaving out coffee (which he always drank) and sometimes even snacks (which he never touched) on your windowsill whilst noisily yelling your greetings to the roofs of the adjacent buildings every morning and goodbyes every night. You got so good at telling what he was feeling at any given time that you knew whenever he was orbiting around you, usually every time some convoluted reasons forced you out of the safety of your apartment in the dead of the night (most of which you fabricated yourself).

Yeah, it was nice, having him around, even though he broke your heart with every single time that his pain resurfaced and swallowed him whole. Sometimes you had to walk straight into your home and throw yourself onto your bed, bawling your eyes out at his emotions instead of your own because he was feeling everything so strongly, so fully and so honestly that you couldn't help but feel alongside him, suffering silently.

He was on your mind so often you caught yourself wondering what else you'd see if you ever got the chance to touch him again, and before you had noticed, he'd grown to be a part of your daily routine, watching over you in a sweetly stalker-ish way.

...

What?

Ok _fine_ , you knew you sounded like one of those awkward heroines in pg-18 "dark" romance movies that fell in love with the most questionable of men who would've probably made Robert D. Hare wet with the number of boxes they'd tick on his psychopath checklist, but it's not like you could do anything to stop your emotions.

Fucking empathy. Fucking hormones. You were sure his testosterone-fueled ass didn’t even cry half as much as you did, over his own feelings, might you add, but you forcibly kept yourself together and stopped yourself from reaching out to soothe that pain because you didn't _really_ like him, you hardly knew him, this was just an emotional feedback-loop and you probably thighs deep in some form of Stockholm syndrome.

In a less magic-y setting, you would’ve just assumed he’d found your twin from another mother, someone who looked almost exactly like you, the " _vertraute Fremde_ " you had heard so often from in german literature, but the fact that you were an empath and he apparently able to teleport left you with other, much more and simultaneously much less likely theories that turned him into an enigma which was stupidly attractive to you for some disapparent reason. The backbone of his story could've been shape-shifters. Or multiple universes. However, the most logical and also most boring explanation would be time-traveling, assuming that he could move his matter from one point to another point no matter where or when it was. Thinking about it, Future-you was as sound of an assumption as Parallel-universe-you was, but in favor of brevity and your fragile heart you'd rather assume that he'd fallen in love with someone you could turn into one day, not someone who didn't even share the same atoms with you.

(Stockholm sends its regards.)

Yeah, you had to talk to him, somehow. But you also had no earthly clue as to how to get him to respond or even show up. What were you supposed to say when you finally managed to rope him into a conversation?

"First of all, sorry bro."

It just didn't feel right, especially considering that Future-you would've definitely known what to do, even though "Future-you" was missing a pretty significant scar on their left eyebrow which meant you couldn't reasonably be them... but who cared about little discrepancies like that, right?

 _God_ , you hated quantum-shit. That stuff was just too complicated in your opinion. And you definitely weren't only peeved because you were somehow jealous of a version of you that probably didn't even know you existed. Nope, that wasn't it at all. It also didn't make you more prone to make stupid decisions, nuh-huh.

Ok, _maybe_ you were being impulsive. Maybe, just maybe you shouldn’t have camped out at your summer-job until it was almost two in the morning and your boss had urged you out of the diner without accepting any more excuses, hoping to get you home before some of the more questionable clientele of the night decided to trundle in. But the only way you could make sure that teleportation-guy was around was by making sure that the other menaces to society were there, too (which should've told you a lot about him but all of your serial-killer-censors got cut off whenever you remembered how he'd felt when you died. No, not _you_ you. The other you. Future-you. You get the drill.), and you really had to talk to him. Like right now. His moping puppy-dog-crap was killing you with the backseat emotional whiplash.

So you did the dumbest thing you had ever done in your life (which was actually pretty damn amazing because you’ve been up to a lot of stupid shit) and stood next to a trash container in a random deserted alleyway yelling “I know you’re here. Come talk to me!”, which elicited no reaction whatsoever because he was being a piece of work and not adhering to novel-logic and you didn’t have any other form of expertise concerning talking to brooding mysterious time-traveling-teleportation dudes that you would apparently fall in love with sooner or later (ignoring the entire scar-fiasco for obvious reasons), which meant that you had just run straight out of options.

Was Future-you even in love with him?

What if Future-you didn’t even like him?!

 _WhAt If FuTUrE yOU dIDn’T eVEn liKe hiM_ , taunted a voice in your head, gesturing at the giant crush you were already nurturing although you hadn’t even exchanged a single sentence with the object of your infatuation, adding a _dumb bitch_ for good measure and additional harm to your health points.

Well, it was too late to back out now.

“Come on! I won’t bite.”

It was a bit obvious that you had no idea what to say, but that didn't matter anyway as he was not reacting to you at all. There was no fluctuation in his emotions, not the slightest droplet of response anywhere on the horizon. After a few minutes of uneventfulness, you were getting impatient because summer was slowly coming to an end and the nights were getting colder, which is why you wrapped your jacket around you and uselessly tried to ward off the shiver that was working its way down your spine, biting out: “Oh fuck right off, dude, you’re not batman. The lurking doesn’t suit you."

Then a more timid: "I'm freezing.”

And there it was, a tiny bit of amusement covering the first signs of deep exasperation. It felt like he was used to you doing stupid shit and provoking him, which shouldn’t have made butterflies awaken in your stomach, but here you were, standing next to a garbage bin, talking to a garbage fire, liking a potential serial-killer much more than you reasonably should.

Ok, fucker. You knew what would get his ass moving, even if it was al little unfair. Bracing yourself, you decided to verbally press your thumb right into his sore spot because you had no impulse-control or patience at all.

“Tch. Die in his arms once and the guy never talks to you again. What’s a resurrected lover gotta do to-”

And before you were quite done with that sentence, he was standing right in front of you, the blue of his powers dying down as the blue of his eyes flared up, his hands digging into your shoulders in a way that would’ve made you yelp if it hadn’t been for the gaze pinning you to the ground through your heart. Emotions washed over you in a desperate wave and if you hadn’t been busy with his, you would've realized that your own feelings launched into a little scat dance of their own when you saw him again after all that time. Handsome jerk.

You didn’t even dare to blink before he suddenly let go and backed away, apparently calling your bluff while something that you couldn’t have pinpointed for the life of you began clouding his feelings.

“Sorry,” you said honestly, “But I really think we should talk.”

And if Agnes was surprised to see you there again long after your shift had ended, with a man that basically screamed “suspicious” in a hundred languages and called your common sense trash in a hundred more, she didn't show it.

**September 3, 2019**

**02:27**

Now that you had gotten used to the onslaught of emotion that hit you whenever he was within a distance of two meters from you, discerning some of his more superficial traits got a lot easier.

You literally started to compile a list in your mind.

  1. He was a scowler, his face always displaying some form of displeasure unless it was either carefully blank or clearly disparaging. He didn’t smile, not even out of politeness when Agnes cracked a joke that had been so bad you just had to chuckle at it, and he could stare without blinking for a far too vast amount of time.
  2. He was older than you, maybe by a couple of years, nothing drastic, but there was no scruff on his face which either meant he couldn’t grow a beard or shaved it meticulously. The latter was more probable in your opinion since you assumed he was way too comfortable with brandishing knives closely to people’s vitals, but maybe that was your own prejudice at play, you couldn't be sure.
  3. He was always thisclose to snapping at anyone who e.g. dared to breathe too loud. Yeah. It was bad. The fact that this seemed to concern anybody in proximity except for you didn’t make it better, but it flattered you in a very weird way. You tried not to read too much into his feelings and concentrate more on what his body language and the rest of him displayed until you realized that you were kind of pissing him off doing this, which, fair enough, but still, _ouch._



And last but not least

4\. He was unhealthily addicted to caffeine.

The silence between the two of you had been dragging on ever since you’d asked for hot chocolate with extra cream and he had snorted at your choice, placing an order for a black coffee in which he needlessly stressed the “black” part so hard it sounded much more like a growl. You had already been faintly aware that he didn’t believe in the concept of sweetness, but the fact that he took it far enough to let his taste buds suffer made your mouth contort in pity, especially when you saw him sigh out in relief at the first gulp, first symptoms of withdrawal vanishing without a trace. He noticed the look on your face and apparently decided he didn’t like it.

“You wanted to talk. Talk then."

You just kinda stared at him blankly because there was no tone to his voice, like, at all, which was truly fascinating, until it occurred to you that he had said something and that he was probably expecting an answer.

"I'm sorry. What?"

" _Talk_."

Now _there's_ a tone. Good old annoyance. This was going great.

“Uh, yeah, o-ok.”

You were a fumbling mess already, and the fact that he had instinctively pushed a fork your way with a fond emotion connected to the memory of you always stirring your drinks with forks (which you did not, what kind of _fucking weirdo_ -) didn't make it better.

"Erm, huh. I- I guess I just... I just wanted to ask why you know me. If you know me. Who you know... urgh, you know what I mean, whoever that person is you're so hung up on and whatever happened to them."

He leaned back a bit, taking in your words and making you more nervous by the second. When he finally opened his mouth and said “I have neither the time nor the leisure to explain that to you,” you were already flat out panicking. His voice sounded like he was secretly insulting you for a lack of basic comprehension skills and also making very clear that he did not want to talk about this particular topic with you at all. In theory, you were well aware that he was just intentionally making this difficult, the way he snapped at you and thus made you shrink back making him feel a tiny little flash of regret immediately, but his standoffish act still exhausted you quite quickly. The napkin in your hands had already been reduced to shreds.

“Well, then… what's your power? Just teleportation? Or time-travel, too? Can you go dimension-hopping, or do you need somekinda prop for that? Are there other people like you? Can you use that power on anything aside from yourself? Were you born with it or bitten by a radioactive spider?”

Now he was giving you a withering look that was specifically designed to peel wallpaper and had the thin hairs on the back of your neck raise up for the occasion. Yes, some part of you still knew he was being an ass on purpose, but the rest was awfully intimidated by someone who had clearly killed people before. It made you shut up until you remembered that you had gotten this far and wasting this opportunity would just be stupid.

“Well, fuck, you told me to talk!? What do you want me to say?” you huffed out, frustrated already, which was probably a thing that both Future-you and him were used to. He waved for a refill. You hadn't realized he'd already emptied his cup.

“How do you know?” Teleportation-guy inquired leisurely, without the slightest tone to his voice, and that could’ve meant pretty much anything if it weren’t for the turmoil of his feelings cluing you in the entire I-died-in-your-arms drama.

“I… uh… had a vision?” you free-balled and although it technically wasn't that much of a lie, he got up immediately, turning around while angling his body towards the exit which made you relent in a matter of 5 seconds as you raised your voice begging: “Ok, shit, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you, come back!” No one in the diner perked up to look, it was too late to not mind your own business, but you still got embarrassed thanks to your stupid social anxiety and reddened slightly. Teleportation-guy stopped but barely turned his head in your direction until you added another “please” which sounded a lot more desperate than you had any business being.

He slipped back into his seat with unfair elegance, and the air of smugness around him wasn’t only insufferable but also barely concealed. That’s when you realized he probably would’ve just blinked away if he had actually wanted to leave, witnesses be damned, and that he probably wasn’t as averse to talking to you as he acted he was.

This had been a mind-game and you had just lost it.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

“I feel things,” was the highly-intelligent explanation that decided to tumble out of your mouth and you wished you’d known a smarter way to put it, but it was probably just your own voice that made you sound dumb and not the words you said. He looked at you with a raised brow, which you assumed meant that he wanted you to specify, and your useless mouth launched into a flight or fight response (boy did it begin running off) as you described: “I mean, I kinda pick up on emotions, the stronger the better. And skin-contact lets me get a glimpse into people’s inner workings. I can also see memories if they’re infused with feelings, or things that are going through people’s heads even if it isn’t a literal but more… intuitive thing, I just basically feel what you feel. It- it sounds a lot more voyeuristic than it actually is, I’ve got no clue what you’re thinking of right now if that’s any consolation. So yeah. Nothing special.”

You carefully tried to cheat your way around lying, intentionally withholding that it was somehow more intense with him and that he made your powers salivate as if he was the delicious piece of sugar that he coldheartedly denied his coffee every single time. Your ability clearly liked Teleportation-guy and you did not know how to feel about that, which was, all things considered, very ironic, but he did not have to know that. He also did not have to know you could force him to feel something if you wanted to, a part of your power that you hadn’t explored ever since you’d given that kid that had pressed gum into your hair in third-grade night terrors. You could be manipulative sometimes. Happily and meanly clever. But some lines weren't meant to be crossed. Even if you had never intended to become a superhero, forcing your will onto someone else was nothing short of villainous.

He looked at you in a strangely intent way and you felt obligated to add: “You should know this. Don’t you know this?”

He didn’t answer, pondering over your words instead, taking an occasional sip of his drink that made you focus on his adam's apple with ludicrous intensity. Then something shifted and you stared at him bafflement, watching his unchanging features while his feelings dampened down, a calculating look flickering through his eyes while he actively suppressed his emotions which, _wow,_ that’s actually impressive, you did not know people could do that. He was reliving a memory, or multiple ones, having obtained a piece of information that pretty much changed his outlook on your proximity (or was it Future-you's, who even knew?), a lot of puzzle-pieces suddenly fitting together in his mind, but they were way too complex for you to pick up anything that made sense to an outsider.

However, his surprise was evident, a tiny bit of astonishment reaching out towards you. It threw you off.

He deadass hadn’t known?

 _Seriously_?

Well, if he hadn’t, then he probably hadn’t known Future-you either, the entire empath thing was kind of a dead giveaway.

“That… actually explains a lot,” he offered with a sigh, and you weren’t sure if a grin or a wince was pulling at the corner of his mouth, wondering why _he_ was having some kind of revelation while _you_ were getting more confused by the minute.

“Explains what?”

“Why you look at me like that sometimes.”

“Look at you like what?”

“Like _that,_ ” he gestured to your face, “You’re doing it again.”

You really wanted to kick him under the table.

“I’m not doing anything. I’ve never had a facial expression in my life, damnit.”

His face was still set straight but a bit of amusement slipped through the cracks of his amour. Then his emotions went from shallow amusement to fucking bottomless despair so fast that a voice in your head dryly commented " _parcour_ " before the damper was back on, and you caught yourself wondering whether he'd get both of you admitted into a mental institution if he kept up with these sudden emotional fluctuations and somehow broke either of your minds while he was at it.

There were words in his eyes now that you wouldn't have understood even if he had voiced them, but they soon were overshadowed by teacher-esque disapproval that drowned out everything else.

“Stop trying to read my thoughts.”

Something about his raised eyebrow made you bristle at his words.

“Believe me, I don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on in that head of yours. I only know you got awfully stabby when the waitress jokingly told you she’d put milk in your coffee, and that’s about it, broody-mc-brood-brood.”

He clenched the mug in his right hand and it felt like he would’ve plummeted anybody else for a less snide remark, replying: "You should really use your power more responsibly," which only served to annoy you more.

"I'm using it responsibly! I am generally responsible!"

"Sounds convincing from a mouth that's got hot chocolate smudges all over it."

"I do not have-", you denied as your voice cracked and grabbed the remnants of your napkin to feverously wipe at your lips, repeating: "I do NOT have smudges, ok?!"

"Why are wiping them off, then?"

"Because you told me tha-"

"Why would you listen if I wasn't telling the truth?"

Oh my god, you were going to have an aneurism right here and now.

In the meantime of your spontaneous combustion, Teleportation-guy sank into a warm feeling for a minute, observing how you tried to come up with a clever response and failed, feeling perfectly content until he remembered who he was and who you were. Even despite the damper, it was painfully obvious: He was enjoying talking to you and definitely not happy about that, trying to force all the fuzziness in his chest back into a dark and cold corner of his mind.

“If you know what I’m feeling, you should know that none of this concerns you."

And that one kinda hit home in a very uncomfortable way, despite your knowledge that he'd _meant_ it to hurt (which he then had the audacity to feel conflicted about).

You placed the napkin down and smoothed its edges to avoid looking at him because he'd sounded so different for a second there, so old. His face and words were strangely disattuned from his true emotions unless they were coated in venom. And you got it, truly understood that he had seen stuff. Lived through it. With another version of you, that was, in the end, an entirely different person no matter how hard you tried to deny it. You had been wondering why he wasn't doing the time-traveler-romance shtick where they told you you were going to fall in love with them and you were totally unconvinced until you — surprise, surprise — actually fell in love with them, but this wasn't about tomorrows you, or the you of next month, this was about a version that had lived with him, been by his side for god knows how long, and probably knew what his fucking name was.

You didn't. He was right.

It didn't concern you.

It was none of your business.

You tried to stop yourself, you really tried to, but sudden indignation forced the words out of your throat anyway in a stupid, stupid defense mechanism that was only meant to keep your fragile heart from breaking any further by inflicting injury upon others: “None of it concerns me? Not even the I’ll-follow-you-around-every-goddamn-night thing, huh?! Not even the fact that I was apparently just as much in love with you as you are with me?! Not that you fucking failed to keep me alive and now continue to make yourself and everybody else suffer for it?!”

He immediately got defensive, walls snapping up between the both of you, and you did not know how he was doing it, but he shut you out of his feelings completely, which made you instantly drop into a mindless rage and get ready to throw yourself at those walls, to rip them right back to the ground where they belonged, have a good look at what he was so desperate to hide now that he knew of your ability. You barely managed to stop yourself, managed to stop the long tendrils of your power that wanted to spread out and wrap themselves around him, drill inside, tear his guards apart by using a migraine that was more weapon than illness to you and would make any person writhe in agony. You just barely stopped yourself from breaking an oath that was more holy to you than your own life, just because this dickhead was scarily proficient at pushing all of your buttons simultaneously.

He definitely wouldn’t have treated Future-you this way! Fuck! This asshole two-timer!

"I have no idea what you're talking about," he said in a scarily calm voice, and you, in return, only got more worked up, yelling: "Yeah, you do have that look on your stupid face like you never get what anybody's talking about at any given time, fucking idiot."

And for a second, there was an honest grin on his face that was accompanied by such a pure wave of elation that you blinked at him and slumped down in your seat in defeat, having missed the sudden u-turn his thoughts had taken so hard that your imaginary car crashed straight over the guardrail of this dispute. With a bit of detachment, you realized that you had sprung up during your spat and that your hands were still braced on the table. You had wanted to throw yourself at him. For a punch or a kiss?

Apparently, not even you yourself knew. God.

Teleportation-guy threw another gesture in Agnes' direction, who had been smartly staying out of your fight but watching it from the sidelines and now brought an entire can of coffee instead of the usual refill, patting your shoulder while passing by. You watched what your colleague/boss probably misinterpreted to be a horrible date as he poured more of the bitter black liquid that you could barely swallow without a shitton of milk and sugar into his cup, and silently wondered whether this amount of caffeine would make a guy his age more prone to suffer from a sudden, cardiac arrest, or just very, very insomniac.

“And now you're looking at me like _that_ ,” he sighed while taking a sip, and you immediately noted that

5\. He liked being cryptic as fuck

6\. and was very proficient at driving you mad.

before instinctively asking: “Like what?”

You were already sick of this game.

“Disapproving. Coffee won’t kill me.”

 _I beg to differ,_ you thought, _if it isn't gonna be your cholesterol, you'll definitely get shot in the face for being very un-charming to the wrong person after you didn't get your hourly hit of caffeine._

“You’re doing it again.”

“FUCK you.”

He once more reacted to the verbal lashing as if you were spewing vows of love, the feelings that slithered through his defenses so weak that you wouldn't have been able to pick up on them if you hadn't been so strangely attuned to him. Then those feelings got brutally stomped down and he frowned, sitting up straight with a business-like air that tired you out completely in-between the duration of two breaths.

"You wanted to talk, but now you're going to listen. I don’t know you and you don’t know me, we don’t owe each other anything. But you do, truly, remind me of Dolores, so I'm telling you this for them, not for you.”

_Dolores? What kind of bullshit name-_

“Someone’s after you, not because you deserve it, but because you're the closest thing to Dolores that they'll be able to find. Until I’ve taken them all out, I’m going to keep you alive, which you’ll probably find satisfactory, and this doesn’t stem from anything you did or anything you are, its just a debt I owe to someone who slightly resembles you, understood?"

And before you could even attempt to unwrap any of that, he was standing up real anticlimactically, smacking a 20 dollar-note onto the table that took care of both of your tabs easily, whereafter he disappeared into the prettiest shade of blue you had ever seen, which was pretty ironic considering he had been spewing nothing but the ugliest things ever since you had gotten here.

The worst thing about it? He hadn’t even lied to hurt you. That had been nothing but the truth.

“Men, huh?” Agnes mused as she snagged the coffee from the table and pushed your remaining hot chocolate towards you, shaking her head in what must've been sympathy.

You called her a dumb, clueless slag in your mind.

But no matter how much you cursed at her and him and Future-you (who was probably more of an Alternate-universe-you judging by how _this_ pleasant little conversation had played out); it didn't change the fact that this rejection had been final, and that it had hurt you a real fucking lot more than it should've.

Great, just great.

**September 10, 2019**

**13:01**

Look, you were trying, ok?

Considering what little you knew of him was either unpleasant or straight-up threatening, cutting him out of your life like he wanted to wasn't the hardest decision you had ever made, even despite your stupid crush on him and the shitty feedback-loop of feelings that each had you close to a mental breakdown after the entire diner-fiasco. But it seemed like the rest of the universe did not agree with your choice because some god, omnipotent entity or fuckhead author kept conspiring for you to run into him, which happened so often you finally relented and began believing in the notion of destiny since randomity did not explain how you ended up practically standing on top of the guy almost every single day after you had sworn to stay as far away from him as humanly possible.

He'd smacked into you last Monday just like the first time you had met, shooting you a glare before sidestepping and taking off again, wherever he was in such a hurry to get to (leaving the possibility that he'd just been in a hurry to get _away_ from you unmentioned). Another time, he got so piss-drunk that he literally showed up in your living room UNANNOUNCED at three in the morning, crashed into your couch, which obviously woke you up, and groggily complained about something along the lines of " _way too many fucking pillows why are you like this_ " before he took a good look at you, saw the skimpy excuse of pajamas you wore and turned so red that you were quite sure he'd explode before vanishing into a little cloud of blue that looked a bit more purple-ish than usual. By Friday, you had taken a walk on a random route to get your head clear and turned up on the site of an abandoned building-complex where you swore you heard him curse to himself somewhere on the upper stories, and there also were all the times when you spotted him out of the corner of your eye and turned to where you _thought_ you had seen him, only to observe the whole bucketful of nuthin' that was present over there. Whether he was still following you, or just as inexplicably drawn to you as you were to him, was was a complete mystery. You didn't know what to think anymore.

That's why you weren't particularly surprised when you ran into him _again_. You had been strutting past the notorious umbrella academy, a building that was quite similar to Teleportation-guy in that they both were menacing and closed-off and deeply aesthetically pleasing, but it didn't seem to share any sort of relation with that man aside from their resemblance, so you didn't really spare it a second glance. Not quite having made the connection between him and those kids that had lived there and apparently done a lot of superhero-y stuff back in the day, you just intended to walk past and go on with your joke of a life, but then, the entrance door was thrown wide open, and Teleportation-guy — _what a coincidence_ — ran out for once instead of using his power as he always did, freezing in his tracks when he saw you before sighing in visible annoyance.

Some lovey-dovey couple chose this exact moment to walk by in-between the both of you and you got assaulted by their idiotically pink feelings.

“Hey,” you said.

“Don’t talk to me,” he answered.

Mystery-guy passed you with quick, purposeful strides and you followed, everything about his pace screaming out the intention of shaking you off. But he did not, in fact, blink away, so you could still keep up even if you had to run to match his ridiculously long legs.

You were aware this was probably meant to dissuade you.

You did not care.

"You've got no manners," you told him knowing full well that he felt responsible for "your" death and did not want another version involved in any way, even though it was not actually _you_ that had died. It was easier to explain your obsession with him through the notion of fate rather than attempting to avoid him when _something_ was clearly forcing you together, and if the universe was this adamant on getting you on his bad side, you wouldn't try to stop it.

Yay for unhealthy coping mechanisms!

"Saying hi sometimes probably won't kill you, you know?"

He didn’t reply and sped up, which literally forced you into a jog because you did not want to be left behind again. There was an awkward trend clearly depicted in all of your interactions, namely the one where he ditched you every single time you got on his nerves, and you did not want to suffer that undignified fate today. Also, you really just wanted to have him around. His absence was making you restless.

"Look, we might not be the best of friends, but don't you think that we could at least-"

Suddenly, Teleportation-guy stopped, and you smacked right into his back, losing your balance in a moment of inattentiveness. He did not try to break your fall this time, which is why you actually landed on your ass, and when you had finally gathered your wits again, you looked up at him in a mixture of astonishment, betrayal, and a little sprinkle of good old hurt.

He, in contrast, looked down at you with hatred.

The clarity of the emotion that radiated off him robbed you of any coherent thought. He didn't even bother to hide it, hating everyone and everything and most of all: _You_. He hated you for not being you, which would've been kinda funny if it hadn't hurt a lot, making your initial surprise turn into pained bafflement. His words were coated with venom.

"Get lost."

7\. He was incredibly skilled at making you feel like crap.

Teleportation-guy turned on his heel and left. You remained sat on the sidewalk, some people side-stepping you without bothering to look while others gawked at you curiously, and your attempt at swallowing your tears was immediately rendered futile by your useless, senseless, asshole feelings.

You knew, ok? You fucking knew. You had figured it out from the get-go, understanding that the person in his memories wasn't you because incidents and surroundings and genes had an influence on people and shaped them to their whims. He'd been through so much with his lover. He'd fallen in love with their habits and reactions and words. He shared history with them, every interaction between them adding another line to the story that they had written together.

You were the asshole here, the one that was hurting him because of some small initial crush whilst attempting to utilize the love he held for someone else who was — theoretically — pretty similar to you on a superficial level and actually fucking _dead_ to force him to like you back _._ And even if you had been an exact carbon-copy, an identical twin to that person, the past version of Future-you, even if all of that were the case, the fact that you did not know him remained, the fact that you shared nothing with him lingered. There was no incident, no memory, no feelings to bind you to one another, and you were so envious of the Other-you for a second that you remained seated, on the ground, on your ass, in one of the most degrading positions you felt you had ever been in, although someone kid in your childhood had literally shoved your head down a toilet, and you could tell where an ugly bruise would bloom tomorrow morning, feeling much, much uglier than it yourself.

You could only watch his back as he walked away and that felt symbolic somehow. A bit like goodbye.

Then he stopped. His head darted to the left, eyes affixed to one of the buildings lining the street. He spun back around to you abruptly, breaking into a sprint before diving into a shade of blue that was barely fathomable. You raised your eyebrow in the meantime and were planning to ask him whether he had any more verbal beatdowns to offer today, but then you heard glass shatter and a really unpleasant noise, and wondered how lax weaponry laws had to be for two shootings to happen in the same street in the span of a month. All other thoughts just kinda dropped to the floor-level of your head. You stilled.

You didn't even know why you were so sure that that was a gunshot until the bullet passed through your heart and embedded itself into the foot of one of the people walking past you.

_Double kill._

(Yay for unhealthy coping mechanisms!)

There was this strange, out of rhythm thud in your chest, followed by an ear-piercing scream and white-noise overtaking over your hearing, and then you had sudden, unusual trouble breathing, not because you couldn't get the air into your lungs but because your chest wouldn't move as you wanted it to, stuck in place as if made out of solid stone, a creepy gurgling sound getting stuck in-between your lips. You were very concentratedly trying to breathe in and you twitched a little. Immediately, the pain spread so hotly through your body that the odd sound between your lips escaped and you fell to the side, arms trying to clutch at your marble chest, not quite managing to get there without making the pain so astronomically worse that you made another chocked-out sound that seemed horrible even to your own ears. It was a different kind of pain than you were used to, not quite as painful as your migraines but painful in another, scarily draining way, and you knew you were dying in an instinct that was far older than yourself, body comprehending your pending departure long before your mind did. Your ribcage felt like it was closing in on your heart.

_You were dying._

For anybody wondering how that felt: 0/10. Not fun. Not recommendable. Actually quite shitty.

Teleportation-guy somehow managed to catch you before you hit the ground, and you wanted to tell him off for being a colossal dickweed earlier, but there was this damn heavy and full emptiness in your chest that didn't permit you to utter a single word, and you could feel his panic radiating off him in waves, your own dread drowning you, detachedly realizing he was running on instinct when you saw how blown his pupils were, pure adrenaline coursing through him so fast it suffocated most of what else he was feeling. Then your vision just kinda turned black, ceasing to work, and holy shit, if that wasn't the scariest fucking thing, to have all lights blink out while your eyes were opened wider than they had ever been in your entire life.

Sobbing out something you couldn't decyper, Mystery-dude — god, you still didn't even know his name — pulled you up and to him and did something emotional-wise that you could only describe as a badly executed backflip, and suddenly everything was blue and warm and the breath that you hadn't been able to draw in was rushing back into you in an oddly involuntary way, the hole in your heart knitting itself back together which _huh_ , that should've probably taken a lot more medical expertise, but what did you know, you weren't a surgeon and also very high on a hormone-cocktail that was tailor-made to keep you from dying or at least trying to draw it out... until that too was suddenly stripped from you and you were hit with sobriety so hard that you almost passed out.

You closed your eyes.

Everything shifted.

**September 10, 2019**

**13:09**

No. No no. There were cracks. Holes. All over his wall. All over the only thing that kept you from getting dragged into the shitshow of his life.

You were so young and untainted. Your eyes didn't hold the same, somehow dark spark that shone whenever you looked at him, but looking at those familiar irises, really seeing the person that they contained, he fell for you all over again. He had sworn he'd keep you out of it, that he'd find a way to stop it all from happening, stop himself from dragging you along with him, but now that there were these chinks in his armor he wanted nothing more than to pull you into his arms and let you live there.

Now you were lying in his arms like he wanted you to, just infinitely more dead, before he flashed you away into a cloud of blue.

"Do you miss the guy you're thinking of when you look at me?"

In hindsight, that had been just a cruel thing to ask.

**December 12, 2016**

**12:24**

When you opened your eyes again, your hand was stuck in some coarse material wound around your neck and a song was resonating from some unidentifiable point around you straight into your head, a male voice urging a boy to go run much more often than anyone should ever be running in your humble opinion. Some cold-ass snowflakes smacked straight into your face which, odd, it was September and one of the hotter ones at that, apparently climate change was more of a pressing matter than you had assumed, and you subsequently realized that you were running, your legs moving beneath you although your entire body had been clutched to a chest seconds prior and also pretty damn immobile because. you. had. been. dying.

 _Seriously_. What on earth?

You were sprinting, bolting towards a bus station until one of your feet got caught on an icy patch and you got ready to hit the ground out of reflex, arms darting out to cover your face although dead people did not need faces. Instead of breaking your nose on impact though, you crashed right into something, or rather _someone_ that suddenly appeared in a flash of blue in front of you, and before either of you could catch or steady yourselves, you fell right through the world as you knew it, everything slipping by like water through your hands. Or one elusive bar of soap. Slippery shit.

 _Huh_ , you thought, while you got pulled through the very material of time itself for the second time in 24 seconds and simultaneously 3 years depending on how you looked at it, _weird._

And when you finally got your feet back onto solid ground you dropped to your knees and began puking your guts out.

**April 1, 2024**

**15:00**

You did not come to, or wake up, or snap out of it, no, nothing like that. All of a sudden, you were just **THERE** , and **THERE** was coincidentally situated right in-between someone's lazily outstretched legs who had apparently expected you just about as much as you had expected to get shot in the chest, which _ouch_ , phantom pain, goddamn it. You did not need to deal with this bullshit psychological recreation of the worst moment in your life on top of everything else. The boundless stimuli you had been left at the mercy of finally overtaxed your brain. Although you were not only used to overloads but also well-practiced in dealing with them, this one was too much to handle, forcing you to remain motionless and silent as your mind attempted to catch up with a body that had gotten killed, traveled through time twice in a matter of seconds and also felt a lot smaller than you remembered it being, which was mind-boggling all on its own. Had your legs always been this short?

“Shit,” you hissed. Then you realized you hadn't said anything and it was actually your human cushion that had cursed out loud, stuck feeling what he felt because you were uselessly attuned to his inner workings thanks to the vast amount of time you spent trying to catch the elusive frequency of his emotions. All of a sudden, you got brushed off the comfortable lap straight onto the less comfortable ground where you slumped down in a heap of shortened limbs and jumbled thoughts. Your mind got factory reset as soon as your rear hit the tiles, elevator-music blaring up in the background as you blinked about a thousand times in an attempt to get rid of your sudden vertigo.

So, taking baby steps: You were an empath, and you hated being an empath, and you had met a guy who had apparently fallen in love with another version of you that hadn't even told him they were an empath, and he could teleport, and clearly travel through time, and make other people travel through time, and you definitely weren’t where you remembered being before, and you had been shot in the chest, and you had died, but you seemed to be alive right now, you were at least 99% sure. The last percent was nowhere to be found because your instincts felt that his feelings were much more important than your own feelings, and thus didn't let you figure out shit about yourself since they were busy being hyperfixated on him.

_He did not love you anymore.  
_

Well, fair enough, you _had_ just kneed him in the groin.

You looked up and owlishly stared right at the person in question, the same Teleportation-guy you remembered, just way younger, not only by the way he looked but also by the way he held himself. He was so hostile towards you, so guarded and weirded out by your unexpected appearance that you flinched back, yearning for the fluffy cloud of adoration that usually smoothed the sharp edges of his personality (which was actually just a camouflaged chain-link fence in your opinion). However, his love for you truly was nowhere to be found. No matter how deep you dug. No matter how frenzied your powers burrowed through his emotions to find it. Believing it was him would've been a lot more of a challenge if he hadn't looked so similar to the mean caffeine-addict that you knew. The taste of his emotions was reminiscent of what you were used to, missing a little spice at most, lacking something that made your heart clench just a tiny little bit.

The thick eyebrows and pronounced features hadn't changed much, but his eyes didn’t carry the same edge to them, although they seemed just as weary as the original's, a bit less generally exhausted, maybe. He was also a lot tinier, a late bloomer, evidently, but that was something you couldn't tell for sure as you were still stuck to the ground while he had gotten up already. There were magazines spawn all around where he'd been sitting, filled to the last bit of blank space with scribbles and odd mathematic equations. He was stepping onto one of them now, but he didn't seem to mind, so you didn't bother to alert him to it, either.

Teleportation-guy-but-not-really averted his gaze and looked around, his failure to immediately scan his surroundings for imminent danger a mistake that Reginald would've severely reprimanded him for. You straight-up disappeared from the foreground of his worries so far into the back that you practically vanished from his thoughts entirely, which was not a great thing to witness, to be honest. But when he found that no one else had decided to randomly drop out of oblivion and projectile vomit right next to him, he reached out for something behind him, just out of your field of vision, which ended up being a gun, and one of the bigger ones at that, training it onto your forehead in one, fluent moment, which also wasn't a great thing to witness, honestly, what the fuck was happening right now?

Neither of you said anything as both of you tried to process, you attempting to figure where on earth you had landed while he wanted to know out where on earth you had come from. In theory, you should’ve had it easier to comprehend what was going on here since you were used to detangling thousands of different pieces of information and interwoven strings of memories. But there was a lot on your plate right now, you were still kinda stuck on the getting shot in the chest thing, and it was very fucking difficult to get over stuff like that, ok?, so you weren't to blame at all. Especially because this asshole was reviving your _very recent_ trauma by holding you at gunpoint! Threatening a clearly distraught human was somewhat of a universally-acknowledged dick-move, and yet you couldn't even get mad at him because the dude clearly did not know you anymore... Why did that fact hurt so much, you hadn't even shared one pleasant conversation with him back in your own timeline. (Cue heartbreaking violin-solo.)

When you were lucid enough to at least remember your own name again, you began thinking, using your intellect and what was left of your three remaining brain cells to try and reconstruct what had happened, starting from what you knew, moving on to what you theorized.

Ok, so, you had died. You had died, or you had been about to, and Teleportation-guy had somehow reversed everything before you could draw your last breath. Since you knew he could teleport, and always assumed he could travel through time, too, it wasn't the most difficult of tasks to come up with a scenario that satisfactorily explained the most recent happenings in a congruent way. Judging by the fact that the outstretched arm in front of your face still had the same moles but not the same length that you recalled it having, you settled into your first theory with surprising ease, guessing what had transpired with a calmness that did not suit you at all.

Your discount-version of a life-savior must've thrown you through time. He must've wrapped you in his arms and launched you back to a long-forgotten winter day when you'd still owned both that hideous scarf and the ruined overcoat you were wearing right now. That realization brought you back to reality ( _which felt a lot more like a fever dream_ ) long enough to notice how hot you were and take both articles of clothing off, mindlessly dropping each one quite close to your puddle of puke. You were amazed that you could still be bothered by heat in your ongoing state of shock, but you had always been a bit more mentally resilient than others. You had had to be, shouldering not only your own crippled emotions but those of others as well, not that any of the highly functional mental cases that you had dealt with were overly helpful right now.

Your hand wandered up towards your brow and began searching for a scar that you somehow knew wouldn't be there because you knew this wasn't your body, at least not anymore. This had been your body before you reached puberty, before you cut yourself in the face with a coconut (long story), before you left the orphanage for good (but still without a family).

This wasn't Future-you. It was Past-you, which now was You-you, a scarless, limited-edition version of whatever molecules made up your consciousness.

You had turned into the person that Teleportation-guy would be hung up on. The one that would die. You took a deep breath. And then another. And then another. You did not know why this had happened, but it made sense, it was logical, in a manner that would've befitted only the craziest of mad scientists, the most ridiculous of all fanfictions. Future-him had thrown you into the past and Past-him had pulled you right back into the future. Certainty enveloped you as you continued on: Teen-teleportation-guy must've been trying to propel himself into the next few years and had accidentally taken you on the ride with him, which was super dodgy, all things considered, there definitely was a higher power of some sort messing with you. And him. Most of all you.

It was so reasonable you felt like you were losing your mind, especially considering this future was looking kinda grim with Not-really-teleportation-guy threatening you for no reason and the amount of mayhem in this decaying mall that you had been hurled into. Was that a fighter-jet hanging through the roof over there? And where had the pillar in the middle of this building gone? Who was even responsible for this hideous clothing exhibition, there wasn't even a single mannequin or display left intact.

It literally looked like a war had broken out in your local shopping center, and you would've found that thought funny if it had registered anywhere in your brain that was still busy trying to gain a standing in this smaller body, this familiar yet foreign place.

Your not-really-but-maybe-slightly-boyfriend-ish boyfriend was saying something, probably asking a lot of questions concluding by how fast his mouth was moving, but you couldn't listen, you had to think, and also breathe now that you were able to again. The awareness that you were hyperventilating only struck you when the movements of his lips stopped and he dropped down next to you, a very hesitant hand beginning to stroke your back very hesitantly, which meant that Teen-teleportation-guy must've put away the gun, yay, fucking traitor, and found his conscience somewhere under the rubble around you, finally attempting to help the deeply distressed person that had been yanked straight from one nightmare into another. Closing your eyes, you tried to inhale at a normal pace, tried to remember nice things, and that didn't help at all because the first thing you recalled was a feeling he did not offer you anymore, a sense of belonging that you had lost forever.

Why did you need him to love you so desperately? What was up with that? Why were you so ok with the fact that the world had ended and so troubled by the fact that he wasn't lovesick over you anymore? How skewed could your sense of perception and urgency even get to focus themselves on something as ridiculous as that?

Well, to be fair, you might've not taken the news of Armageddon as well as you thought you had, but the end of the world still didn't weigh up to the strain of a universe in which Teleportation-guy did not love you anymore.

...

Wait.

 _What_ had you just thought?!

You looked up and around you and that's when you finally noticed how half of this building was just... wiped out. And not "everybody's gone to the rapture" wiped-out, no, nuclear weapon levels of wiped-out, _there's-only-ruins-and-dust-left_ wiped-out. Through the giant hole in the left side of what you remembered to be the biggest shopping mall known to The City, you spotted other buildings in a similar, often worse state, some of them so broken you hardly recognized them as the homes and stores they had once been anymore.

Helplessly, you moved your gaze back to Teen-teleportation-guy, and your heart sunk as you took in the rest of his appearance now that he was closer because he was dirty, his hands scratched open and raw, his eyes desperate, something in them strangely unfocused. You felt a lot. He felt a lot, too, generally a lot more than you, or at least more comprehensive things since your emotions were just a big ball of untouchableness. To be more clear, at the same time that you felt nothing because you were feeling too much, he felt very, very carefully happy, and that's when you understood where your earlier conclusion of the end of all days had come from because this poor guy was anxiously glad that someone else was alive... while remaining highly suspicious of your sudden appearance since everybody aside from himself was supposed to be dead.

_What._

"What?" you choked out in horror, and it did not seem like he knew an answer to that, which is why he replied with a question of his own in that stupid, dead, flat tone of his that was meant to keep everybody at a distance: "How are you here?"

You did not know an answer to that, either.

The staring resumed, and you grew more uncomfortable with your body and your surroundings by the second as the understanding of what his emotions were implying settled in. Since the truth was the only thing you had ever been able to manage, especially in extremely stressful situations, you sat up a bit straighter, stealthily leaning into his touch to respond: “I think you might've dragged me into the future." And that was that.

If anybody knew a better way for this conversation to go, they were very welcome to tell you, because you had no idea what you were doing. If you were him you wouldn't believe yourself. But since Teleportation-guy had always been the quick-witted one, he got closer, and he remembered, remembered running into someone before ending up here. He'd been trying to prove his father wrong and jump through time, jump as far as he could manage, which is why he hadn't been paying all that much attention to _where_ he was going as opposed to _when_ he was going, a lapse in judgment that ultimately made him crash into you. And that could've been it. Teen-teleportation-guy could've nodded his head and admitted you were right, which then would've enabled the both of you to move on to the important questions, for example what astronomical shitshow had decided to wreck The City (and apparently planet earth) in your absence.

The odd thing that threw both of you for a loop though, was the fact that the particular memory of stumbling into you was an old one, a distant piece of recollection from fucking _years_ ago.

Six, to be specific.

Your thoughts finally quieted down, whereafter a single, childishly gleeful voice in your head chimed " _what the fuck is going ooooon_ " with conviction as you tried to comprehend anything of what you had just found out.

 _No way_ , you thought, _there's literally no way._

"That's impossible," he also contradicted calmly, albeit discussing an entirely different topic from what you were stuck on, no tremor in his voice as if this dispute was the most pressing matter at hand, as if there weren't more urgent themes you should've talked about. It somehow ended up steadying you both, centering you in a moment that seemed so foreign neither of you had managed to gain a foothold in it. It was a mess. All of this was inconceivable.

"I would've had to want to take you with me, and I didn't. I don't know you," he reasoned.

Well, that wasn't difficult to dispute. Baby-steps. You could start by showing him.

You held out your hand, knowing him well enough to know he needed proof, a silent request for him to start his experiment. He took it even despite his initial discomfort at joining hands with someone who could've possibly wanted to backstab him, and you felt his initial surprise when your fingers brushed against eachother. He hadn't really expected to be able to touch you. He hadn't really expected you to be real.

Flashing away in that amazing shade of blue that had begun feeling like a hug to you, Five held onto your hand, reappearing only a few centimeters to the right. You followed, empathy somehow also latching onto his powers, although he'd clearly intended to prove you wrong, intended to leave you there again, all on your own, in the middle of literally nothing, in the middle of everything crumbling down around you, and in that second you got hit with the understanding that Future-him had left you alone for the last time, which _oof_. Boy. That one pinched you right in the chest-area. Not-teleportation-guy's emotions came rushing into you as they usually did when your skin connected, but since you couldn't even figure out your own feelings, you barely managed to comprehend his.

"It's my thing," you lied smoothly in a way that only someone dead to the world could muster, taking in his flabbergasted expression with something akin to pleasure. "I'm a feedback loop for powers. Make 'em stronger, not use them though." You pulled your hand out of his grip and immediately missed his touch.

It wasn't a lie, now that you were thinking of it, at least not really. You knew you could feed your own feelings back into that loop and weaponize them, but had never dared to do it again after the first time had destroyed another human with a flicker of your ill-intentions — that child had not deserved the fears you had forced it to suffer through. That's why it only made sense that something as personal and emotionally loaded as abilities would somehow connect to your empathy, too, especially when it was about _him_ since he quite literally was the catnip to your feline. Attempting to recreate another power with the emotions that were contained in it sounded a lot like something that your shitty abilities would get up to. They probably had gotten intertwined with his time-traveling-shenanigans and decided to tag along for the fun of it.

 _The hitchhiker's guide to the armageddon._ Nice, just nice.

You did not know why you didn't just tell him everything right there and then. You did not know if there was a bullet in your heart or not. You also did not know whether the world had actually ended or he just lost his mind, but judging by the fact that this mall looked like it had been taken straight out from one of these dystopian young adult novels, the chances for the former possibility stood incredibly well.

You only knew that you were in a different time, in a different body and in a different place than you had been before, while also being knee-deep stuck _in the goddamn apocalypse._

It didn't even sound as absurd to your ears as it had earlier anymore. What else could reduce a human being to the cloud of negativity that Teleportation-guy had been if it weren't for the literal end of all days? How could he have gotten so ruined if not for the fact that he got stranded somewhere with only one other person to rely on, a person that would die and leave him on his own forever? How could he have fallen in love with Future-you (who was probably just you now, urgh, this was gonna get difficult to keep a track of), if it weren't for the fact that the only reason someone like him could ever find you attractive was a severe case of co-dependency? (Cue sad violin music, part two.) Judging by the standards of a normal civilian, an apocalypse was way less absurd than Future-Fives unconditional adoration for you. Your thumb was pressing into the missing scar on top of your eyebrow so hard your blunt nail drew blood.

In the middle of all of this, you had the audacity to feel happy. For a tiny second. Just the duration of one breath.

Then your mind took over, reconstructing thoughts at the speed of a bullet-train (bad metaphor, _bad_ metaphor, phantom pains) and the last bit of dazedness dripped off you like liquid oil. Slippery shit. You got the gist.

Squishy-cute-him was saying something again but he was a lot less threatening than Future-scowlmaster-him and you just had a big revelation, so you remained submerged in your thoughts, detachedly staring at his face while the cogs in your mind turned so fast they steamed. You knew you were repeating it to yourself a lot, trying to internalize what had happened, which probably should've made it feel more real, which it didn't, but one more shitty encore: You had died, Future-him had thrown you into the past somewhen before the coconut-incident and puberty because you were tiny — well, at least tinier — whereafter past-him had dragged you straight into the apocalyptic future, along with your teenaged body, fucking asshole, and if your intuition wasn't wrong, which it never was, sadly, just like it never told you any good things, you would actually die and leave him scarred forever, which would _then_ lead to _his_ future version avoiding the edition of you that you had been previously. Past-you. Yesterday's-you.

 _Oh my god_ , these were new, untapped potentials of bullshit.

You sat there, still looking at Teen-teleportation-guy without really looking at him, and honestly, if you hadn't been an empath, all of this would've been so fucked. You would've probably believed none of it. But because you had grown up knowing that some things were just fucked like this you managed to calm down a lot faster than you reasonably should've, accepting the fuckery with a feeble shrug of your shoulders... except for a single little detail that kept bothering you.

"What year is it?"

Teen-teleportation-guy did not avert his gaze. Despite this, you could tell he felt uncomfortable without tapping into his feelings, just by the way that one muscle in his jaw grew taut. He raised from his crouch next to you, brushed off the non-existent dust on his trousers and you knew he was stalling for time in an attempt to figure out how to best phrase his following words before he simply stated in response to a stupid fuck's stupid as fuck question:

"2024."

You blinked.

"Come again?"

"You heard me. It's 2024."

You blinked on more time.

And then, you began laughing. Hard.

Your "lover" shuddered, the genuine amusement in your voice unsettling him for a second before he understood it as the coping mechanism that it was and intelligently decided to wait it out. He was also observing you with slight disgust, which pained you until you realized that you had just barfed and probably some remnants of a quick snack stuck to the side of your mouth, but who was he to judge, he looked like he'd been living trough Doomsday.

Yeah, suffice to say _that_ thought only made you laugh harder, you laughed until your sides hurt and you doubled over, and then you laughed some more when you remembered that this guy had not only been _living_ through Doomsday, no, he'd been doing it all on his own, for the entire duration of _six fucking years_ , like in that one movie where the dog died.

Suddenly, the honeymoon phase of inappropriate amusement was over, and everything came crashing down like you on an icy patch of asphalt, leaving you reeling and reaching out for something, anything to hold onto as you jumped up to your legs in a panic, stumbling into one of the mannequins that still sported both of their legs but none of their arms, which fell over as you tried to steady yourself on wobbly knees that had apparently decided to mimic chocolate eclairs. You haphazardly brushed over your mouth with the back of your sleeve and hurled yourself instead of your innards straight out of the hole in the wall as if it were a main-enterance-way, stumbling through a city brimming with life suddenly filled with death at every corner, broken buildings, chapped streets, and burnt vegetation greeting you in its wake. The first time you saw an actual decomposing corpse made you dry heave, stomach constricting around nothing since it had already emptied itself earlier, but by the twenty-second, you didn't even spare them a glance anymore, pushing yourself faster in an urge that you did not understand because you couldn't catch a single moment to just _feel,_ let alone _think_. You would've been unable to name the part of town that you were in then, but you knew how to get to the main street from there, and from there on to your apartment, which had been reduced to a heap of rubble and the remnants of the cute elderly lady which lived two stories beneath you judging from the familiar glasses lying next to a half-pulverized skull that still had a brick stuck inside of its eye socket.

Standing there for a while, you remained unmoving, feeling like you were still sprinting, like everything was still rushing past you in a blur. Then you proceeded walking at a slow, deliberate place, gaze brushing over everything in sight like the butterfly-kisses a person would pepper onto their beloved. None of it felt real. None of it felt true, the sudden lack of emotion and life and _fullness_ around you a lie that scared you with its intensity. The City was so empty, so quiet. Wrong. Bloodcurdling. It was also hillarious, somehow. Real funny. The kind of amusing that made you want to laugh your guts out into a toilet.

Despite the distance being no more than thirty minutes on foot, you took well over an hour to get to the orphanage like a tourist on a shitshow-sightseeing-trip, peering up at a building that had been older than time in your viewpoint and was nothing more than ruins now. Sinking to your knees, you observed something you had believed to be indestructible presenting you with nothing more than its broken bits and pieces, and you had seen enough in that moment. It was plainly obvious that this was the end of all days. You believed it now, you could wake up now. You were crying. You felt so sad that the new potted plant on your windowstill had probably dried up in your absence, if it even existed now that teenaged you had ended up in the worst possible future before Actual-you had been able to impulse-buy it. You wanted to go home. You wanted to get annoyed at the afternoon traffic. You wanted to breathe normally again.

He appeared next to you at some point, approaching like you would approach a wounded animal, withholding his breaths and placing his steps carefully as if not to unsettle you any further. You tried your best to tune out his emotions because both rightful mistrust and silent pity would've pushed you over the edge, but as he did so often, Teleportation-guy didn’t quite react as you thought he would, lowering himself onto the ground next to you, sitting down with his legs crossed, way too content for someone that had locked himself into the apocalypse with no way out.

You had the silent suspicion he was content about having you here, and you got fucking mad at him for an emotion that couldn't have been more understandable, especially to you, especially with your abilities.

"Name's five," he told you, which showed how messed up his priorities were, but you were thankful for it somehow. It helped soothe your burning nerves a tiny little bit and also made you less prone to randomly punch him in the face.

"Five?" you echoed, "What a shitty name." and after a second of pondering you decided to add an ill-intended: "Daddy must've loved you a lot."

His smile was so self-despising that you would've kicked yourself in the mouth if you had seen it, but your gaze was stuck on the only place that had ever felt like home to you, not quite believing what you were seeing, not quite believing it was actually there looking so... broken. Broken like you had been back then. Broken like any other damn house that you had passed on your way here.

"Madly," he lied, "He'd lock me in a room and only let me leave if I managed to teleport myself out of it."

You sharply exhaled through your nose.

_Excuse me, what the fuck?_

When your gaze shifted, you saw his expression and immediately regretted the jab at him that had been nothing but a childish impulse of self-protection through other-harm. His sudden truthfullness had also caught you off guard, but that was probably a thinking-you're-the-last-man-alive-and-then-learning-you're-wrong thing. You didn't dare ponder over what kind of person his father must've been if Five was stuck with a name that was essentially just a number.

Ignoring how the amount of your tears doubled at the mention of his daddy issues, you decided to think of a worse name yourself as some convoluted peace-offering, a name that would surely piss Past-you off because that dumbass had been an idiot of the highest grade, a name that would make you whince every time you heard it come out of his mouth.

“I’m Dolores," you lied, too exhausted to think about predestination or time-paradoxes. It was difficult to keep a straight face, but the cumulated trauma of the last few minutes helped numb your expression.

"Dolores?" he hummed, "What a shitty name."

Then, without missing a beat: "Mommy must've adored you to bits."

"Yeah," you answered, staring at your feet now, "She's dead."

There was a tiny little pause and a flash of something in his emotions that both of you ignored, relishing in the other's company in an oddly pacified way. Soon, he began nodding as if he was about to say something profound, and you steeled yourself for a punchline that you couldn't have possibly known was coming.

"To be fair, her being alive would've weirded me out more."

As if on cue, you began snickering as a slight smile began to curve his lips upwards. A time-traveler and an empath, in the middle of the apocalypse, feeling like there was nothing at all that they should be talking about right now whilst sitting in front of a building that looked like a third world war had broken out in its backyard.

8\. He was going to fall in love with you.

9\. Five was going to love you.

10\. **You** , not anybody else.

You hated how naturally your brain settled for that particular realization to build your pending escapism on.

**April 1, 2024**

**16:27**

"So," he said after a while. "Can I offer you something? A drink, maybe?"

It was a very odd attempt at normality, but eh. You'll take it.

**April 30, 2024**

**11:59**

You were well-practiced at falling into a rhythm that would've been considered pure madness by any other normal person. Or, to be fair, any other person at all.

But luckily your life couldn't fall apart if you never had it together in the first place!

Five was still moderately suspicious of how you'd gotten here but at least somewhat convinced that a convoluted psycho could've in no way acted as dense as you did most of the time without giving themselves away at some point ( _gee, thanks_ ), which is why you ended up being roommates with him, the last two survivors of the apocalypse (who had unfortunately failed to show up for the occasion) camping out in a library that you had personally chosen as a hide-out because he had previously pursued the "I'll sleep when I faint" approach to surviving in a wasteland. Luckily, the foundation of this building was made out of stone instead of wood, wherefore the fire that must've raged through this place a while ago hadn't completely destroyed this particular house like it did with the rest of The City.

On your first day in Ragnarök, you found a king-sized mattress, or more like three of them because the lower supply levels of the giant Ikea downtown had been relatively unharmed (damn Swedish mafia), and you just spread them all over the foyer in an attempt to keep busy, forgoing the few spots where the roof had been cleanly blown off by god knows what. In the end, you simply forced a grumbling Teen-teleportation-guy to fix the holes, while you, in the meantime, cleaned out the inside of the library so nicely that you almost forgot you weren't playing animal crossing but trying to build a shelter of sorts, decorations plastered all over the place to make it look more homely. It was beautiful, truly.

Sandstorms plowed through The City occasionally. They were horrible.

You acted liked they didn't exist.

It's not like you and your pre-lover ever ended up talking about the important things. You still did not know much about what went down during or before the six years he spent on his own, and the equations he kept scribbling onto every accessible empty space were nothing more than gigantic heaps of numbers and the occasional letter to you. The last few times you had dared to ask him about anything had ended with Five passive-aggressively telling you he did not know either and ignoring you afterwards. Since your empathy wasn't quite as insightful when you didn't share skin contact, you were left to your own devices, cowering in a cozy corner whenever the needling hisses of sand against the remaining windows resounded, wondering if he was any better at dealing with them or just as much of a shivering disaster as you were. A conversation was practically impossible to uphold between the two of you. What little you could read from his stagnant emotions were either the comfort of having you around or his annoyance at your personality.

Who needed love when you had this kind of mixed appreciation!

 _Urgh_. It was tiring.

But you weren't the only one that was growing exhausted. Teen-teleportation-guy was clearly overworking himself at this point, but it's _also_ not like he'd listen to you and stop. Most of your concern simply bounced off the thick wall of silence that he kept building up on his initial distrust towards you. When you had tried to get him to take a break for the third consecutive time, Five had simply shut a door to your face. And _man_ would you have loved to stomp off after that, to go and vent your indignation in the woods or something, but captain edgelord never allowed you out of his sight or immediate proximity without blowing a fuse, so that was a clear no-no. Leaving the library without telling him would probably make one of the veins in his temples burst.

However, you couldn't really bring yourself to tell him to fuck off, either. Not when you felt how terrified he was you'd disappear again as he brushed up against you in the seldom and stolen moments that you sought out each other's company, how convinced he was that he must've been imagining you in an attempt to escape reality. You took up the habit of humming whenever you weren't within direct sight of him. Little lopsided tunes that came to mind as soon as the stillness of the world got unbearable. He would calm down considerably with every new song, but when your voice roughened and died out after a while, he'd come check on you with a look in his eyes that made you want to hug him for some unclear reason. Additionally, he'd always end up next to you when you woke up during the nights, although he never went to bed when you did, not sleeping, not near enough to touch but instead a certain distance far off, working on his brain breakers under candle- or flashlight, carefully positioned so the brightness wouldn't bother you. It should've been creepy. It should've pissed you off. But instead, you listened to his pen scrape against the paper and counted his steady breaths. You let yourself be lulled back to sleep, knowing he'd be there if one of the storms hit and decided to rattle the building and your nerves alike. You felt safe when he was there to watch over you. It was illogical, but his odd behavior soothed you a lot.

Maybe, someday, you could convince him to read you a bed-time story.

Maybe, someday, you'd actually talk to each other.

(... _Yeah fat chance, that jerk had trouble greeting you in the mornings_.)

Other fun activities during your first few days at the end of all days amounted but were not limited to:

  1. ~~Stealing~~ Rescuing pillows and blankets and "every single damn plushy in town" as Five (honestly, shit name) put it.
  2. Reading your way through the part of the library that hadn't gotten burned down.
  3. Trying to make something edible out of the supplies that either of you brought "home" with them during their "hunts".
  4. Searching for anybody else that was alive.
  5. Trying not to get bored whenever he locked himself away with his equations.
  6. Trying not to distract him whenever he locked himself away with his equations.
  7. Making sure he wouldn't dehydrate whenever he locked himself away with his equations.
  8. ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* Making cute figurines out of stuff you found lying around! *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧
  9. Building make-shift graves for the corpses in proximity.
  10. ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* Decorating the make-shift graves with your make-shift figurines! *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧
  11. ~~Trying not to lose your mind.~~
  12. Reading your way through the unharmed half of the library. Again.



Yeah, it was quite a busy few days for you, **NOT** , hence why you began observing your apocalypse-companion closer than you had ever been able to, so close that you could've voiced a slightly condescending documentary on him.

A few of your questions got answered subsequently, even if he never did so by using his words like other people would. For example, you figured out why Five was so adamant on staying in The City **:** not because he wanted to linger or anything, but rather because he had _returned_. Looking for survivors in every part of the continent, Teen-teleportation-guy kept coming back, staying for a couple of days before setting off in the exact opposite direction, which is why he hadn't bothered much to look for a home base and keep it intact. The only reason he'd currently stuck around for such an expansive while was your unpredictable arrival — Twink-teleportation-guy (THERE, you said it!) did not want to overtax you by immediately taking off somewhere, which was admittedly very gentlemanly of him, and also made you feel bad for slowing him down.

There was only one place in The City that Five visited religiously, and although he wouldn't tell you what it was, he also didn't actively keep you from tagging along.

That's how you ended up in front of four similar-looking rubble-towers next to a building that was still deeply aesthetically pleasing and somewhat closed-off even in ruins, the Umbrella Academy worse off than any of the other constructions lining the streets. Those uneven heaps of wreckage were simple, yes, but knowing that the wounds on his hands must've stemmed from gathering them together turned every single one of those graves into a piece of art.

Sad art, but art nonetheless.

The first word that came to mind when you watched him stand there, bowing his head slightly without any further indication that he'd come to greet them, was "devastation". Because no matter how cold Five's back appeared from behind, you knew better, knew of the heavy burdens weighing down on him, saw the storm raging through his chest, leaving his heart in bits and pieces. You could tell how much he felt and how desperately he was trying to suppress it, his brusque attitude towards you nothing more than immense amounts of guilt feeding off one another. You could tell that he'd been very close to whoever was laying beneath those stones, and it killed you to know that he must've put them to rest himself.

For that reason, you forbid yourself from thinking about his name and what it insinuated.

He never spoke a word, and he never stayed for long, but that young man kept coming back every other day at nightfall, paying his respects to people that he felt were important, feeling like shit for being unable to save them, feeling like he did not really know them. It was a bit confusing how much he despised them at the same time that he loved them, but you reckoned that he felt that way because they had managed to die without his explicit permission, ~~just like you would. Ha ha.  
~~

You gave him space, as much as he needed, because you couldn't tell him the that he'd prolonged your life for quite a while, or at least that he would, someday, this time-traveling-bullshit was super-confusing and you did not want to mess up a time-line and accidentally wipe yourself out. You gave him space because you didn't have anything else that would've been worthwhile for him, only closing in on your orbit around Five when the loneliness of the world made both of you feel incredibly small and painfully weak.

You didn't ask whom he'd built those graves for.

You didn't ask why he kept that odd prosthetic eye on him at all times.

You didn't ask why he never told you anything although the curiosity was killing you because you could tell he was agonizing over whether to involve you in his knowledge or not, whether he should dim the light of your eyes with his words, whether he should make you feel as devastated as he did or leave you with the naive hope that everything would get better.

It sometimes felt like whatever took out earth didn't care much for the buildings but made very sure to kill every last living being.

You tried no to be too curious about that, either.

**April 30, 2024**

**15:06**

"I'm a Hargreeves!" he hissed in response to whatever stupid argument you had gotten into, eyes flashing and mouth pulled into a scoff that would've made you shrink back into yourself just a few weeks ago, knowing full well he kept that awful gun close to him at all times.

"Lazy excuse for your personality disorder, Five," you retorted calmly. "You're still an asshole."

And that was the first time you heard him laugh out loud.

**May 1, 2024**

**16:44**

"I'm not going to do it."

"You are _so_ gonna do it."

“I just said I won’t.”

“And I just said you will.”

Granted, it wasn't a very intelligent verbal stake-out, but it got him annoyed fast enough to make him do your bidding anyway.

Shooting you a glare, Five expected you to at least shrink back. But what this little, cute fridge did not know was the fact that you were used to Future-him's attitude, who was at least Antarctica-levels of freezing, which is why his younger self's cool aloofness did not deter you in the slightest. Quite the opposite, actually: True to your word, you forced him to teleport another king-size mattress right into the middle of the foyer in order to finally convince him there was enough room for the both of you in that actual king of a bed because he kept chivalrously wrecking his spine on that tiny sofa in the office that was a little singed on the edges and carried an according scent. _Gross_. Lined by heavy bookshelves on either side and drowned out beneath a ridiculous mass of pillows, blankets, and plushies, now rested a bed that was less bed than just four goddamn monstrous mattresses concealed underneath a trench coat, spread on the ground like a carpet made of dreams, and you fucking _loved_ it. You hadn't even bothered to look for sheets to fit them. Even your ugly shawl couldn't match up to the sheer size of your construction.

You were an empath. You had a shitload of feelings to work through. A pillow fort was the least you deserved.

Diving straight into the mess, you hid there for a day, doing nothing but reading fairy-tales and those books that you had adored back when you were a child, happily munching on stale crackers that had long since passed their due date. It felt a bit like a holiday, even though it had already gotten strenuous to stay afloat on canned food and questionable water-supplies without your favorite snacks to last you through random episodes of binge eating. At the very least, the toilet in one of the posh lawyer-offices down the street and the showers in a fitness-center just right of the library were still working, but Ragnarök didn't have a lot of other redeeming qualities going for it, which is why you were acutely aware that you shouldn't be having any semblance of fun right now, even despite having the time of your life. You rethought that sentiment when you heard how Five kept stressing that he'd endured six years on the bare minimum of existence, which always made him sound a lot older than he was, and always made you a lot sadder than you were, wondering whether you weren't taking this entire apocalypse-thingy as seriously as you should've.

But the actual point where you realized that you needed to stop deflecting through amusing pass-times was when you saw Teen-Teleportation-guy settle down next to you, flipping through an autobiography named "Extraordinary" that had your eyebrows disappearing above your hairline in three seconds flat. Everything about his sudden behavior was somewhat amazing, first and foremost his lazy posture, but you didn't dare ask what had brought forth this change of mind in fear of reverting it right back.

You offhandedly asked him whether he liked his current reading matter.

"It's ballsy," he answered, humoring you for the first time in a long while. "My sister must've gotten a lot of shit for writing this."

And you couldn't help but hold your breath in response, lowering your own book slowly.

_The graves._

You stared at his face for well over a minute, but he merely went on reading as if he wasn't aware of your gaze, acting like he hadn't just dropped a truth-bomb the size of a nuclear missile on your head while using an off-handed comment on an autobiography to hide it.

There was no one waiting for you, not a lot of people you missed except for those few special ones that made your temples throb with the accidental thought of them. Being an empath had made you keep your distance from most people because you had been scared of what they... _you_ could feel. For them, from them, did it really matter? So you couldn't really relate to the faint hue of emotion that now radiated off him. Not at all.

Yes, you still missed those few madmen that had seen your non-verbal "Keep Out" sign and just walked past it with a sick e-guitar solo and somebody screaming "DISRESPECT YOUR SURROUNDINGS!" in the background, but it's not like you had been especially close to any of them. Not close enough to warrant the fondness that Five was feeling for the person that had written that book. The pure adoration he was feeling for his _sister._ He might've seemed like an only child judging by the minefield he camouflaged as his personality, but now that you knew better you saw the little signs in his actions and mindset that proved you and the entire world wrong for assuming he grew up on his own. His name, too, made more sense now, a number that was less name than just a label for an object, one of many.

The force that kept driving you was a nearly perfected ability to repress anything that you disliked, whereas his anchor were his friends, his siblings, his family... which he had buried himself.

Yikes.

That boy — at 18, you still considered him to be one, although you theoretically were only a year older — read that damn book with such a painful mixture of wicked delight and honest sadness that you couldn't help but break your promise to the world, pouring a bit of calm into him when you patted his shoulder, taking it away from yourself because you didn't need it as much as he did. It wasn't an earth-shattering amount, just barely enough to make the strain on his body retract its spikes, enough to make him slump back into some of the coziest pillows you had managed to scavenge with a content sigh.

You hated that this was all you could do for him.

"What's her number?" you asked, hoping that he wouldn't notice the tremor in your voice.

**May 2, 2024**

**19:44**

A few hours earlier, Five had managed to pull out an old fuel generator from god knows where, and suddenly, there was light expelling the darkness of night, shining straight into your shriveled little heart since it had gotten difficult to read at night in the glim of the candles you had robbed from a shop down the street. It was a bit ironic how well that little store had survived an apocalypse that had burned literally everything else down, but now that you could rely on electricity instead, you did not care much for its luck, immediately setting out to look for fairy lights, little lightbulbs in differing colors and the most ridiculous gadgets you could find, which had him busting your ass 90% of the time because they were _unnecessary_ and _wasteful_ and borderline _idiotic_. He got so mad when you drove past him on a Segway — however that thing had held on when a bit of rain usually overtaxed it, you'd never know — that he actually stopped talking to you for a week.

But after exactly seven days, your "boyfriend" broke his oath of silence and stopped locking himself in the office with his weird equations for good. You tried not to visibly relish at how he found the noiseless world without your incessant chatter unbearable and he tried to not visibly recoil at the smug grin on your face.

Life was good like this. Odd, but good, you liked the kid, he wasn’t bad company.

But honestly, you still couldn’t get used to it.

You already had a life. A routine, filled with something as mundane as getting bread from a bakery or a nice cup of tea on a lazy Sunday morning, your friends and their mindless company that warmed you even in the coldest of days. You even missed the last meals before pay-day and your odd jobs and wonderful boss and your professors, and now you had the answer to why Future-five hadn’t ended himself although all the emotional pushers had been there: He also missed all of that. And more. He was trying to find a way back, back to his family. Despite their lack of shared blood, they were siblings, all of them horribly emotionally stunted as you learned when you started reading the overly lengthy, witty, and extremely concerning autobiography by his sister that was apparently named "Vanya Haargreeves" in secret. You probably would've liked her if you had ever gotten the chance to meet, or if you _would_ ever get the chance to- (bad line of thought, bad line of thought, _bad line of thought_ , try not to think about how-) You were going to die.

(Again.

What the fuck was your life.)

It was a bit scary how detachedly you accepted that statement as irrefutable truth. It kept gnawing at the back of your mind, reminding you to keep a distance whenever it got difficult to do so, and you did, time after time again. You weren't particularly nice to the poor guy, shying away when you could, withdrawing yourself when possible, barely interacting, only providing much needed emotional support whenever he'd break down without it. The only thing you allowed yourself were occasional cheers for his weird maths (Or was it physics? Who knew.) and your nervous rants when his stare got too heavy for your taste, and yeah, ok, fair enough, you might've snuck a little closer in the make-shift pillow-fort whenever he was haunted by another nightmare, but it's not like that would ever tip his scale in your favor. In the past few days you'd caught yourself sending over a bit of calm, a sliver of peace more often than not, stealing away some of his aches and fears and storing them in that bit of your heart that you had locked when you were little and the matron in the orphanage — the closest thing to a mother you ever had — thought of you as little more than another mouth to feed, but that amount of concern should be permitted. That much should be fine.

You didn’t dare ask where or how he’d slept in the last five years.

You were a bit scared of the answer.

Yes, indeed, you clearly were emotionally invested, you admit it, but you never did anything that could let him realize this, lightly and most of all s _ecretly_ supporting him from the shadows. You knew what he felt, for fucks sake. There was little more in there than his fondness for a companion, the appreciation of how useful it was to have someone to keep him sane. Five didn't value you more than someone might like a Tamagotchi, but that was great, that knowledge wasn't painful at all, this was the way things were supposed to be. No, you weren't bitter about it. Him not falling in love was the best outcome for all parties involved.

Even if _you_ ended up dead, at least Past-you wouldn't get dragged into this stupid somehow very one-sided crush on a guy that was supposed to be senselessly in love with them. You had lost the coin toss as you usually did with things that involved luck, and that was ok, you didn't mind, on the contrary, with each new day, you had to repress the fact that you'd die a bit less because you somehow got used to the thought, accepted it with a shrug, every unpleasant thud in your chest hurled into the deepest, darkest part of your mind.

He must've noticed something too since he was a bit more on edge lately, but whatever: You didn't know him and he didn't know you. Neither owed the other a thing.

Future-Five had been right.

(And that was the root of the problem, because you knew him now, his antics, and his expressions, and his moods, and his likes, and his dislikes. Now that you were supposed to uphold the line Future-him had drawn, you couldn't, because your little crush on Five had never been as little as you thought, because your emotions had never been easy to suppress, because you just wanted to hug him without fearing to overstep a border that would leave him in shambles. You liked him. This version, too, but you often caught yourself thinking that this wasn't your Five, wasn't the right one, and you'd immediately pull back after that, remaining the stranger he shared a very life-changing event with and nothing more.)

 _Strangers_ , yes.

Strangers that happened to know every last fucking thing about each other because they were the last humans alive.

Even if you weren't doing the best job, you must've done a decent enough one, because Five hadn't made any of the memories yet, hadn't fallen in love or anything remotely close to that. This _version of him_ would undoubtedly break down once you died, but not because he'd lost someone he loved, just because he'd lost the only other person on the planet, and that was totally fine with you. Totally. No emotional hurt over here! Only alternate-timeline joy!

_Apocalypse companions, strictly platonic._

Future-Five would be so proud of you.

**May 5, 2024**

**7:30**

"Why do you keep using forks for that?"

Your hand froze in the circular movement as you peered down into your cup of hot chocolate (made with water instead of milk, RIP), cheek mindlessly resting on the knuckles of your other hand since you had been submerged deep enough in your thoughts to open a diving school. Functional tableware wasn't hard to come by. An unused spoon was literally placed atop the table right in front of you. You could've used anything but a goddamn fork, your fingers, even, but you hadn't.

"Why don't you mind your own business?" you told him cooly, continuing to stir your drink like a fucking lunatic.

**May 8, 2024**

**21:37**

The first time you fucked up _real_ bad and didn't even notice was when all that repression finally got to your head and destroyed a few brain cells while it was at it. You decided to excuse yourself for an hour while shouldering the sledgehammer that you had found in a construction site and thickheadedly dragged back "home" even despite Five's protests and walked straight out of the library without uttering another word.

You theoretically knew that Future-him had loved seeing you smash stuff with it, but since Present-him was pretty hung up on his equations, definitely not in love with you, and you adamant that you'd be back in an hour and wanted some fucking privacy, you didn't worry about him being around to witness anything at all, thinking that he would rather drop dead than leave his calculations when he was on the verge of a breakthrough.

It was the rule, anyway. If one of you wanted to be alone for an hour, they could be alone for an hour, you had fought very hard for that tiny little leeway in his amateur's version of a surveillance state and you would keep enforcing it until the day you died ( _unfortunate_ _phrasing_ ). So, as long as you got back a bit earlier than anticipated, Five wouldn't come looking for you since he didn't give a flying fuck, and you could go about your business without fearing he'd somehow get a stiffie over watching you destroy public property. Your plan was foolproof. You couldn't mess it up at all.

(What you were blissfully unaware of was that he — contrary to popular belief (alias your own assumptions) — _always_ followed you. He had to make sure, make sure you were there, that you wouldn't vanish and leave him on his own, because you were the last bit of sanity and joy he had, the last bit of _good_ , and he would hold onto that piece even if someone were to cut off his hands and burn them in front of him. He followed you when you took a stroll outside in the evenings, never making his presence known although you got creeped out by every single shadow and he stupidly wanted to protect you from all of them. He followed you when you visited the tombstones of his siblings and sat in front of what you presumed to be Vanya's and he knew to be Allison's to tell her what he'd been up to lately, painting your stories in such vivid detail that Five caught himself grinning even though you were mostly complaining about his actions. He followed when you checked up on your apartment and he followed when you visited that one building that had been dilapidated even before the apocalypse and he followed you when you looked around for more plushies to add to your monstrosity of a bed and he followed during most of your trips to the toilet or shower (with a certain distance, he wasn't _that_ much of a creep, especially considering how you usually asked him to accompany you) and he followed you when you stole away to cry at night because you did not want to wake him with your distressed sobs. Despite his natural aversion to the sound of the latter, Five always remained close-by, ready to step in should it ever be necessary.)

He had followed this time, too, watching you boil over with a sledgehammer clutched in your hands, hot anger painting your face in vivid, unfamiliar emotion.

The sight was nothing short of glorious, the closest thing to divinity he'd seen in a long time as you swung your tool and made it collide with what was left of the orphanage, ripping down the last wall that had remained standing with ease and a warcry that had something in the depths of his stomach constrict. You always shut him out as you did with everything else, it felt like everything was just a game to you with no feelings invested, but now that you were raging, letting the wrath rush around you, he felt closer to you than ever, trying to remember every last thing he saw now in fear of never getting to see you so alive and _real_ ever again.

You were so beautiful he didn't dare blink lest he'd miss a single second of it.

You were so beautiful he wanted to cry.

You broke stones, remnants of furniture, glass, floor-tiles, anything. You broke it all and seemed so relieved that he couldn't help but enjoy the show, basking in your anger because it tethered you to the moment with him.

But when you were done, you visibly deflated, falling onto your knees in the mess you'd made out your first and only true home, a place where you and other's had lived before, a place that took you in when no one else cared, sobbing apologies into your hands, begging someone who was long gone for forgiveness that they couldn't give anymore.

He turned away while closing his eyes and clenching his fists, biting onto his lower lip so hard it drew blood to keep himself from rushing to your side.

Five had always been bad with distressed people.

But you were — by far — the worst.

**May 8, 2024**

**23:02**

"Huh?" you exclaimed. "When did you bust your lip?"

Five didn't even look up from his can of beans.

"None of your business."

**May 11, 2024**

**17:15**

The second time you fucked up ruh-eeeel bad was just as unintentional and careless as the first, a tragic testament to the abysmal state your common sense was left in after getting stranded in armageddon without the internet to keep you occupied.

Right hand placed on the shoulder of a mannequin that had somehow survived this mayhem and only lost one of its arms, you looked down towards Five from the make-shift pedestal you were standing on, huffing out an "I will ditch him for you. He's horrible. He won't even take a single pillow with him." in playfully exaggerated indignation.

"It is unnecessary weight. It will slow us down," reasoned More-easily-annoyed-teleportation-guy from where he was sorting preserved food without sparing a single glance in your direction. He had been in this sour mood the entire day, and you were hell-bent on forcing him out of it, not that you had any idea on how to actually manage that.

"Our dear Fives here just doesn't understand that I have a certain standard of living," you continued without listening at all, "The brute would live on a pull-out sofa if given the chance. And do you know what he did? The madman _actually_ slept on the sofa -"

"- I told you I left it like that because -"

"- without even pulling it out, like, can you imagine -"

"- it would waste time every evening to open it and -"

" - how ruined his spine is already, just after a week of sleeping on that atrocity -"

" - it would waste time every morning to put it away and -"

" - the back pain he's gonna have in his forties _if_ we manage to sur- "

Both of you immediately shut up, because the insinuated words to follow your melodramatic outburst were hanging in the air between the two of you like a Damocles sword, ready to strike down if anybody made a wrong movement.

 _Fuck_ , you thought, recalling how badly he reacted to the if-clause, _I scarred him_ _again_.

Awkwardly coughing into your hand to alleviate a tension that was more of a dead weight, you patted the mannequin on its back, jumping down from the platform in such a haste that you promptly twisted your ankle in some kind of weird, cosmic karma. He wasn't anywhere near enough for you to pick up on the wave of impending doom washing over him, and you weren't looking closely enough to see his heart-broken expression, but you still tried to salvage the situation as well as you possibly could to avoid another awkward dinner in the confines of your shelter, limping over with your hands raised in surrender and a grimace.

"You know, I sometimes wish you were less focused on getting us out of here," you admitted. "We can't even tell what's gonna go down in 2020 if the apocalypse never happens. Who knows? As soon as we get back we might land neck-deep in a global pandemic because somebody ate an undercooked bat or something."

The fact that you didn't even fault him the slightest bit for pulling you into this horrific future made his heart sink, but Five carefully schooled his expression back into its usual, unfeeling stagnation before he waved you over to take a look at your sprained joint.

**May 13, 2024**

**03** **:01**

It was a well-estabilished fact that you had no impulse control, and only a question of time until you'd finally snap at him, which is why your third fuck-up happened sooner than anyone could've anticipated, marking down another small yet brilliant entry for your comprehensive track-record in making dumb decisions.

He did not look up when you barged into the cute little office on the upper level of the library and stood in the doorway with both of your hands resting on your hips, however, everything about his body language told you that he'd noticed your arrival and that he really wanted you to get lost before he had to address it. Without missing a beat (he was a fridge, not a freezer), you darted towards his figure that was seated atop the table (fucking weirdo) and made a grab for the pencil in his hand. Before you could reach him, Five blinked away and shot you the most unimpressed look you had ever seen from his new position in the heavy leather armchair behind the desk, lounging there like a gangster in some old, black and white film. The godfather, maybe. Just a lot less threatening. More endearing than anything else, to be honest. He was very lucky to be handsome.

"What do you think you're doing?" Less-mysterious-mystery-guy asked disinterestedly.

You lunged for him again, over the table, and he flashed into color before reappearing on one of the shelves, lazing there with an even less impressed expression, his gaze aimed at you with something akin to ridicule twisting the corners of his mouth.

"Dolores. What are you doing?"

There was interest now, but it was the same kind of interest you'd spare an idiotic pet that kept running against the glass-door of your terrace, which kind of riled you up with its arrogance. It was also great timing for him to utter your "name" because it additionally pissed you off enough to spur you on even further, pushing your exhausted body past its limits. Dignity was an unknown word to you as you ran towards the shelves and stood on the tip of your toes, trying to jump up at him like one overexcited Golden Retriever would, missing his long legs by a single centimeter that had you _fuming_.

Five's brows were furrowed now.

"Dolores! Stop!"

You didn't stop.

"I'm intervening. This is an intervention. You're going to take a nap."

"I don't need a nap."

"You haven't slept in three days."

"I didn't need to."

"Five, come down from there immediately, or I swear to god I will whoop your ass!"

Cringing a bit at how you sounded like one of the stricter caretakers in the orphanage and in the full knowledge that you couldn't beat him in a fist-fight even if his hands were tied on his back, you shot him a glare from your disadvantageous position, attempting another leap at him that failed completely. He remained where he was, lowering his gaze back into his equations while trying to tune out your distracting movements as best as he could. In a second of unpremeditated genius, you pulled some books out of the shelves, which were all valuable editions of some sort but no one was around to care about that anymore, and committed the horrible atrocity of placing them atop each other so you could use them as a makeshift ladder. One of them was Shakespeare's _Midsummer Night's Dream_.

You didn't feel too bad about stepping on that one.

"Will you stop causing a ruckus?" Five finally snapped as he likewise snapped his notes shut, and that's when you managed to get a hold of his ankle.

It poured into you instantly. Memories. Emotions. Something that you could only describe as entirely and purely _Five_.

You got to meet his determination first hand, and seeing its true face left you reeling so hard that all anger was forgotten, making you lose your balance promptly.

He had to solve his equations. He _needed_ to. There was no other possible path he could take, no form of distraction he'd allow, not even sleep, because he needed to get _you_ out of this hellhole as soon as possible. His resolve was woven through the memory of you flinching during one of the sandstorms, a look on your face that he never wanted to see again, underlined by the view of your hunched form on its knees in front of the orphanage, dwarfed by the building even in ruins as you cried your heart out with a sledgehammer clutched to your chest, apologizing to everything and no one for being alive. His will power was reinforced with the memory of a crooked grin on your face, a smile that attempted to hide the devastation behind it, as you presented him a dusty, ripped plushy that was missing an eye amidst all the rubble around you, calling it the cutest thing you had ever seen. You were the reason he was working himself to the bones with his equations.

The unstable tower of books gave out beneath you.

Just like your tower of lies.

Fives pupils constricted and he flashed away while reaching out to catch your other outstretched arm, and you followed, pulling yourself towards him through the space-jump while carefully forgoing any bit of skin as you enveloped him in a hug that had been long overdue, landing in his lap as soon as you resurfaced back in whatever "reality" was. The clothing between the both of you did not manage to deter the bond from developing, it couldn't stop more of his emotions from flowing into you in a steady stream because you were so attuned with, so used to his entire being that you couldn't help but connect, couldn't stop yourself from prying. Your powers began purring in delight after being denied so long and immediately rushed to provide you with feelings you didn't want to know about because it wasn't right, because he wouldn't want you to know.

Your abilities proudly revealed the first bit of fantasy they had ever found in his mind, an image conjured up by nothing but his imagination, not linked with memory but filled with emotion, a lie made of nothing but what he felt, and you felt your heart stop in response.

It was you. Just you. Surrounded by people in a busy street, grinning back at him while stretching out your hand in the invitation as life shone in vibrant colors all around you and got reflected back at him in your eyes. It wasn't real, but the prettiest goddamn thing you had ever seen, and if how he saw you were available as an Instagram-filter, you'd use it for every single picture, because _damn_ , you were glowing. Sparkling. Radiant. All the cringy words in a romance novel. All the stars in a night sky.

Tears welled up in your eyes and you choked on your own breath trying to sink deeper into his embrace, deeper into what his daydreams were made of.

Fuck. _Fuck!_

~~(This wasn't very platonic, now, was it?)~~

**~~Shut the fuck up, disembodied voice!~~ **

You held on for dear life and unintentionally poured some of your adoration back into him, a little bit of warmth, a tiny sliver of "It's ok. It's going to be fine.", letting some tears slip down your cheeks in scorching streaks.

"Let go," he demanded, trying to make it sound like he was talking to a petulant child, but the fact that you were a year older than him made you immune to his attack, refusing to move because he'd see your tears and immediately worry about nothing. "No," you sniffled, and ok, maybe you were acting like a petulant child, but the fact that his hands were burrowed into the fabric of your clothes on your back proved his command to be a lie. It would've been easy. You could've worsened his exhaustion for a second to make him faint on the spot, however, you clutched him even harder, throwing all self-respect out of the window as you begged: "Just five minutes, Five. Put your head on a pillow for five minutes and I will leave you alone for one entire day."

Since he knew that it was a very tempting offer, Teen-teleportation-guy didn't take much time to agree: "Fine. But if I don't fall asleep, you don't get to bother me about my resting-habits for a week." And you immediately nodded like the filthy liar you were because there was no way you could keep a promise like that.

Scrambling off his lap while stealthily wiping your tears on your sleeve, you got up and brushed off non-existent dust from your pants, hoping he didn't notice the reddened edges of your eyes or how your voice had turned a bit more nasal. Watching you, in full awareness that you were trying to hide the fact that you had almost cried from him, Five realized that he liked you in a very objective manner, feeling oddly empty as soon as you left his arms, wishing you had stayed for a single minute longer.

You were straightforward and intelligent, but neither stole from your kindness, the inexhaustible energy you could bring up for anything's wellbeing aside from your own so infinite that it bewildered him occasionally. He appreciated and admired you, even adoring all those things that drove him mad about you, for example, that goddamn inexhaustible energy that you could bring up for anything's wellbeing _aside from your own,_ always placing anything and everything else over yourself in a heartbeat.

Five thought, _yes, I like you_ , and felt like that conclusion was only logical, like that was how things were supposed to be, just because it made sense.

You, in the meantime, stared at the two books of your tower that remained, your last lies, stacked on top of one another, assuring yourself that he wasn't in love with you, that you hadn't messed up, that he was just very nice and feeling very guilty.

That wasn't love. It wasn't. No way.

Your heart was beating out of your chest.

You acted like you didn't notice.

**May 13, 2024**

**05:07**

Five fainted before his head hit the pillows.

**May 19, 2024**

**19:16**

The fourth time you fucked up REALLY, REALLY BAD was when you finally realized you must've messed up despite your human equivalent of horse blinkers, and you were finally forced to face the repercussions of your idiotic actions head-on.

You were a bit tipsy that night, amusement flashing through your eyes as you watched him fiddle with the gramophone and a single working record he had found somewhere amidst the rubble. Relishing in how his frustration washed over to you as if to complain to a lover he'd grown old with, annoyed but not truly angry, you brought a bottle of irreplaceably valuable Cabernet Sauvignon to your lips, which was surely just wasted on a heathen like you, but oh, who cared, every single vintner you had ever known was dead anyway.

While you were tipsy, he was flat-out drunk. Nonetheless, Five was a lot more put together than you, the only sign that he wasn’t the usual Teen-teleportation-guy being his slightly wonky movements and the tiny little grin on the side of his mouth, an expression that perfectly displayed a dimple curving through the two moles on his left cheek. Since you weren't sober anymore, you didn't even bother hiding your stare, wondering how on earth you were supposed to find it anything but deadly charming, and seriously considered whether to walk over to him and just stick the tip of your front finger into it. It felt like the entire universe had conspired to make you adore him, which was rude, and mean, and fair enough, because that guy definitely was a goddamn piece of art. ~~A sad one. But art nonetheless.~~

A gravely, male voice began singing, and you groaned as Sinatra belted out the first few lines of _Fly Me To The Moon_ , soon beginning to chuckle as the enjoyment in Five's emotions betrayed just how much he liked that kind of music despite his earlier protests that he wasn't acting like an old man and that his taste was definitely up to date. Current Drunk-him was a riot. You loved this version because the other Drunk-him was just freaking rude and mopey all the time, and you also noticed that it was weird how many different variants of him you knew now, every single one hardly compatible with the others. Who would've thought that marble-face-stone-heart Five would be so fucking happy about a subpar vinyl record, huh? Look at this! Look at this!! Who would've thought?! Not you. Nuh-huh. Definitely not you.

Your object of infatuation liked wine although his taste buds probably hated it, and you quickly figured that he must've used booze to occasionally numb whatever panic welled up in him when he felt especially defenseless, at least until you came along which, _nice_ , you were a substitute for alcohol, how sweet, but that knowledge was something your buzz managed to overshadow so easily that you forgot all about it the next time you blinked. It was so easy to disregard it all. It was so easy to play pretend. Especially when Five stumbled over nothing because the usually so collected Teleportation-guy that couldn’t be shaken even by the goddamn apocalypse was a bumbling fool right now.

“Fucking idiot,” you chortled, taking another heavy swig from the bottle in your hands, trying to sink deeper into your pleasant state of ignorance as if it were a fluffy blanket.

When you set your drink back down you saw him looking at you, and you grinned at him in a way that offered a fight until you remembered™ and the stupid smirk was wiped right off your face.

Fuck. _Fuck!_ Shit.

You scrambled to turn away, to break the moment, but it was already too late, you could feel something warm in his emotions well up until it was scorching and you couldn’t ignore it anymore, couldn’t brush it off as friendship or companionship or whatever else dumb excuse you had come up with to brainwash yourself into believing a fucking teenaged boy wouldn’t get hung up on the only other living human being on the planet.

Adoration was radiating off Drunk-him, who didn’t immediately beat the emotions down as Sober-him would, and you did not fucking now how you deserved it, you had hardly done more than push him away and push him away and push him away a bit more, and you knew this was one of his core memories, one he would cherish and hate and one that would turn him into the mess he’d become if you didn’t do something about it right fucking now but you did not know how you could stop it, never knew how to put an end to your need to see him happy, never figured out how to stop yourself from wanting _more_.

You couldn't suppress your empathy. Not when he had finished the autobiography and read the afterword, an ill-intended jab at his sudden disappearance contained in the last two lines, and proceeded to laugh at the joke although his emotions were crying, not when you had hugged him after the office-fiasco, carefully foregoing his skin as he had acted like he was ok, like he somehow had to brace all of this on his own and couldn't have a single bit of weight fall onto your fragile shoulders. There had been every “You can do it, I know you can!” when he’d been stuck in his equations, and every “Look what I found! It’s so cool.” when you saw how heavy the fate of the world, or the fate of his siblings, or just _your_ fate pressed down on his psyche and you couldn't bring yourself to regret any of it. You couldn't stop yourself, not when you were able to help, not when you _needed_ to help so badly.

How on earth had you been supposed to ignore him whenever he began blaming himself for dragging you into this hellhole although he wasn't at fault at all?

You had done a shitty job. And you weren’t quite ready to admit it, thinking of a way to scavenge the situation, to save whatever little distance between the two of you was left. Feeling like you’d taken advantage of his vulnerability and hating yourself for it almost as much as he despised himself without accepting the fact that you had been closer to him than you should've, you braced yourself and decided it was time to tell him the truth. Nothing but the truth.

“Five,” you said, placing the bottle down so carelessly it immediately tipped to the side with a clang and emptied all of its contains onto the hardwood floor in a pretty red puddle, which begun lapping up at your feet and quite resembled his feelings in an oddly aesthetic way. A little stain was nothing compared to what the fire had done to this place, but you felt horrible nonetheless, like it was a bad omen telling you to shut the fuck up. “Five listen to me.”

Perfect, kind and strong little him noticed the tone to your voice, tilting his head in an invitation to go on, sobering up a little with the urgency of your words because he was like that, always thinking of how to keep you content, keep you safe.

You didn't deserve him.

“You’re gonna make it. You’re gonna find a way back. No, don’t smile at me like that, I know, I actually know. I knew about the apocalypse, I kinda knew I would end up in it, someone told me about the future, I just never thought it would actually happen to me, I just never thought it concerned me at all." Unable to stand the look in his eyes you lowered your gaze to the puddle, forcing yourself to continue: "You’re gonna find a way back home, and you’re gonna find other people to love, to actually love, not to be depended on, and you're gonna bring both of us out of this pieve of shit future, I promise. I promise you. So give yourself some time. Don't rush. You'll do it, you already have. We're going to be drinking an acceptable cup of coffee back in 2019 before you even know it.”

_We.  
_

Were you lying to him or yourself? Who knew.

When you raised your gaze back up, he was still drunk, drunk but always a bit smarter than you — or Einstein, you supposed, that boy was so genius it scared you occasionally — that's why you could see understanding settle in, could see when he got what you meant, what you were trying to tell him. But he was also still drunk, which meant he had no related questions to ask, for example why you'd kept this from him for so long, or why he'd been important enough to your life in the past that you would know this about him, or why the fuck you were talking like you were rejecting him although no confession had been made.

All that was left were his stupid happy feelings and the dumbass honest grin on his face that left you reeling because you were used to his asshole smiles, the snarky little twists of his lips that took nothing and no one seriously, but there it was, a thousand-watt, pure, truthful smile on his face with **DIMPLES** and damn did it blind you, why were you like this, why was HE like this, nothing was going the way you wanted it to.

Five didn't usually ask for your permission when he intended to touch you, but he'd always leave a little leeway should you ever want to pull back. He did not do so this time, happy and buzzed out of his mind, his hands landing on your hips, picking you up as if you weighed nothing, twirling you around in a rather dangerous fashion for someone who'd just downed a few more sophisticated vintage wines than any unfathomably rich person back in the day had access to. Of course, it wasn't him that got sick, but you, and you tapped him on the shoulder in a sign to settle you back down, but what you didn't account for was that both of your noses would brush up against one another as he lowered you, and for a second, wrapped in his arms, you forgot how he was just a kid still, an eighteen-year-old boy stuck in the end of all days with you out of all people.

A tiny little voice in the back of your mind tried to convince you to kiss him.

You flinched back as if you'd been electrocuted, reddening in an immediate response to his unexpected proximity and your more than inappropriate thoughts, pushing at his shoulder to get him to let you go.

It dampened his fluffy, pink emotions, but the smile on his lips never wavered.

**May 20, 2024**

**19:16**

You were pretty sure he remembered what you told him, but Five never asked what you had meant.

**June 1, 2024**

**20:23**

The fifth and second-to-last time you fucked up got overlooked in favor of your dwindling brain cells, you barely had one and a half left at this point and you needed to use them sparingly. You didn't bother pondering about your botched plan to keep him from falling in love since you lacked the capacity to worry about spilled milk and because he was apparently dead-set on adoring you to bits, whereafter you simply chose to let fate do its thing and wait it out (which clearly was a horrible idea, every single time you had gotten in contact with fate had ended with you calling her a bitch, but whatever, this was fine, everything was all right and you were stellar at repressing circumstances that weren't working out in your favor.)

Celebrating the last day that you would spend in The City, you let your gaze sweep over the burned-down street that had been a home to you for the past few weeks, silently honoring your only resting place in the most turbulent times imaginable with a drink. Seated next to you, also looking at the view, Five began turning the beer can in his hands restlessly.

“Do you miss him?” he asked, and that question threw you off because, although his tone was so void of emotion you weren't sure whether he had ever modulated a sentence in his life, the feelings surrounding him were vigilance and curiosity and good old enviousness, and you had been talking about an entirely different topic about a second prior. There was no way you would've been able to keep up with his line of thought even if you had been a damn mind reader.

“Ramsay?” you asked, honestly clueless. "Well, I don't know the guy, I just said I liked watching him yell at numbnuts. Claiming I miss him would be-"

" _Not the cook_."

Five clicked his tongue as he usually did when you were spouting nonsense, shaking his head.

"I meant the guy you’re thinking of when you're looking at me.”

 _Oh my._ It felt like you'd heard this kind of story before and didn't like its ending.

Since you definitely had NOT been ready for that one, you kinda just blanked out and _stared_ in silence until the hilarity of the fact that he was jealous of himself hit you so hard you probably strained a muscle in the attempt to hold your laughter. Then you remembered why him being jealous wasn't funny at all but real fucking concerning instead and every single emotion on your face immediately died down ( _Parcour!_ ). Thoughts were rushing through your brain at the speed of a bullet train in an attempt to figure out how on earth you were supposed to answer that question diplomatically, and you were left drawing one blank after another that only added to your bafflement.

This was a karma thing, wasn't it? Just how you had fallen in love with an unattainable version of him, he had gone and begun liking you, the only difference being that _you_ could actually… No, you couldn’t. It would strangely and inexplicably feel like cheating, and you didn't really want him liking you a lot when you finally kicked the bucket, it was a moral dilemma whose outcome was kind of obvious. Becoming somewhat self-aware was growing annoying. You didn't want to deal with the situation at hand as responsibly as you needed to.

So, because you were a shit liar and he knew you well enough to spot the smallest fib, you just nodded, the motion the closest thing to the truth you could manage, feeling too tired to attempt another white-lie that was only technically the truth if you squinted with both eyes. You missed Future-him, dearly so. Was it wrong of you to want to meet him again, even if that meant that Past-him had to go through a lot of additional trauma?

Well, probably yes, but that didn't change the fact that you really wanted to meet Five again. Your Five. Not a _version_ of him. Yours.

You took a sip of your beverage and knew he wanted to ask more, curiosity and discontentment battling it out while you waited and let it sweep over you in an attempt to drown out the things that you were feeling. He wanted to ask you if you hated him for locking you into this bleak place with him. He wanted to ask you what you had wanted to become back in a world that hadn't been ruins and corpses. He wanted to ask you why you were acting like you cared and gave him so much hope only to pull back whenever he wanted to assure himself this was real, that you were real. He wanted to ask you what you were thinking, what you were feeling. He wanted to ask you if you could ever love him back.

Teen-teleportation-guy did not ask a thing and apologized instead, downing his remaining beer with a big gulp subsequently.

It would've been easy, acting like you didn't know what he was apologizing for, but this was somewhat of a special occasion and you kind of exhausted from treading on the same, thin line all the time, which is why you went along with him for the first and hopefully last time in your life saying: "Nah. I'm the one who owes you an apology and like, what?, 60 bucks for fare dodging? Remind me of that and I'll treat you to a meal when we get back, alright?"

 _When,_ not if, and empty promises. You had learned from your previous mistakes: Five wouldn't figure out that he was going to leave on his own until he was securely tucked back in the past without any possibility to ruin his entire life just because he wanted to drag little old you with him.

He did not answer, and you didn't say anything else, either, the leisure mood changing into something heavier that unfortunately reminded you of back when you had been shot in the chest. The last time he'd been in such a dark state of mind was when you had remembered something you'd heard in Future-his memories and accidentally blurted out that his equations were off, which was another one for the time-paradox-bingo, but who cared, and for an intrusive second, you wanted to tell him everything, or at least everything that you knew of, you even opened your mouth to inform him that you were going to die pretty soon. Then you let it fall shut without uttering a single word.

"I actually dragged you into this mess, didn't I?" he inquired quietly, and you were still wondering on how to ship around that one before he added: "That seems about right."

There were so many things you could've said or done, to make it better, but instead the words that rushed out of your mouth were: "I've got no clue what you're talking about." To which he retorted: "Yeah, you do have that look about you like you don't know what anybody's talking about at any given time, fucking idiot." And suddenly, everything just kind of fell into place. The snort which you replied with was almost pavlovian by now. It did nothing to hide the fond grin that was pulling at the corners of your mouth and his heartstrings.

You loved him. There was nothing you could do about it. You loved him so much you'd make sure he'd never end up being who he was back when you fell for him.

"Were we talking about sequins? I like sequins. How about you?"

It was a horrible attempt at switching the topic, but he thankfully went along with it, his off mood soon dissipating somwhere in the air around you, which is why you managed to fall asleep there, on the patio of the library, your head resting on his shoulder and his arm wrapped securely around you, the last day of your time in The City slowly coming to an end with an evening-sun gliding underneath the black horizon and even blacker clouds. Dead to the world, you didn't even notice how he pulled you closer and pressed his lips against your hair, murmuring promises and apologies and all the other things he couldn't have said if you were listening to him in a soft voice. He brushed the knuckles of his left hand against your jaw adoringly and whispered:

"I love you."

As if it were a prayer.

(You didn't hear a thing.)

**June 7, 2024**

**08:05**

And that — somewhat anticlimactically — summed up your short time spent in the post-apocalyptic version of The City quite well.

Five had wandered off to fetch a van that had been left behind in the approximate vicinity of the shopping mall because only a car of that caliber would fit the rolled up twin-sized mattress you had been adamant about taking with you on top of all the other stuff that you couldn't bear parting with, which might've or might've not included at least 20 pillows and almost half the library's worth of books, but who counted, anyway? The streets were fucked. So were the highways. You did not know how Teen-teleportation-guy intended to drive anything anywhere, but you weren't going to complain, either: A road trip was a road trip even if it began and ended in the same backyard. As long as your Not-really-boyfriend was there to accompany you, you wouldn't needlessly worry about a thing.

Declining his initial offer to come and get the vehicle with him, you remained back at the base, sorting through the last bit of your supplies while silently bidding every corner of your giant bootleg pillow fort farewell. Since it wouldn't take him a lot of time to teleport to the van and drive it back here, you weren't all that concerned about remaining on your own for a bit. Your twenty minutes of solace would pass faster than anticipated, and it's not like a creepy vacuum-salesman could show up out of virtually nowhere and trick you into signing a dodgy contract that would rope you into some life-long-lasting pyramid-scheme. The only thing that could possibly ruin your peace would be a sandstorm, but even although its first signs were already dawning on the horizon, you reckoned that Five would be back before the extreme weather phenomenon could hit, so you just went on with your humming without a single concern in your mind.

Which is how your sixth and final fuck up came to life.

The pronounced knock on the entrance door behind you made goosebumps erupt all over your skin, startling you out of your false sense of security in an instant and making you drop the glorious bag of twinkies that had put Five off of sweets since he'd bit into one that looked deceptively edible and obviously had gone bad during the past years anyway. You hadn't thrown it away for some dumb, uselessly sentimental reason. Now it lay prone on the ground like the bit of trash that it actually was. Although sounds and movements had already been scarce in this future, you realized that it had never been quite as silent as in those endless seconds after the steady thumps on the wood resounded, never quite as still as it was right now when you remained frozen in the middle of the library, heart thumping out of your chest. Everything was so noiseless and unmoving that you felt like time had stopped and you had somehow missed the cue on your own.

But that couldn't be. There clearly was another person behind that door right now. A person that hadn't been stopped. Someone that wanted to come in.

It wasn't Five.

"Hello?" chimed a female voice that couldn't have been any sweeter. Your blood felt like it was clogging your arteries as your heartbeat sped up by threefold. That sound was so deeply unsettling that you cowered instinctively and an intense urge to flee began welling up in your entire body, your gut telling you to go running for the hills, as far as your legs would carry you, straight into Five's arms if possible, but you couldn't, your feet were glued to the ground as if you were an unsuspecting deer staring straight at the headlights of a goddamn five-thousand-pound-heavy hummer. Whoever had decided to drop by randomly, in the middle of the apocalypse that had presumably wrecked every last survivor except for the two time-traveling freaks, scared you so much your knees almost gave out. You stared at that door as if the devil had personally dropped off a housewarming gift on the patio.

You couldn't, for the life of yourself, figure out why the rational part of your brain kept telling you to open that fucking door because it was "the smartest thing to do".

There were a lot of feelings coiling behind that piece of wood, eager to make themselves known to you, just as sweet and elegant and fucking horrifying as their owner, inviting you with a lovely flick of their tail and the underlying promise to swat at you with their claws if you dared to draw closer. People with emotions like that made you want to hide, to curl up into a tiny little ball and disappear because they spoke to the part of you that only knew primal fear and submission. The part that was scarred by years of abuse. Logically, you knew that running would make the person who owned these emotions want to chase you, but since you had always been more reliant on your brawn than your brain, you couldn't bring yourself to open the only thing that physically separated you and the scariest person you'd ever encountered, because that person was fake, unreal, their entire being interwoven with the only form of love they had ever known: The love for themself, egoism and hybris battling it out upon layers and layers of badly repressed anger management problems and childhood trauma. The owner of the amicable yet threatening voice that had just called out to you cared for little, and what she cared for was having fun, preferably at the expense of others. Although that kind of mindset wasn't all that unusual, her's was deeply infested, as if a black piece of charcoal had been plunged into her chest in place of a heart. She was shriveled. She was battered. But she dealt with it very differently from how one should approach trauma, while your coping mechanisms undoubtedly also were heaping piles of shit, they couldn't quite measure up to the flaming garbage pile of her repression methods, a mountain so high no one could climb it even if the Everest was a walk in the park to them. You were uncomfortable just having to feel what she used as substitutes for actual human emotions.

Whyever you were so sure that you'd have a bad time if you didn't, you finally went up to the door and opened it with a badly shaking hand, immediately sensing how she found your compliance to be rather unexpected but a pleasant surprise. You clutched the handle and door itself for additional leverage, but it still felt like a strong gust of air would sweep you right off your feet, like you'd fall anytime soon as the door swung open with the most comical creak ever. The woman that now stood in front of you was so beautiful it blinded you, her thousand-watt smile presenting shiny rows of teeth that seemed a bit too blunt to fit her face. The fact that she was the prettiest human you had ever seen made your initial dread worsen by an immeasurable amount.

Prior to that encounter, you would've expected to be happy to meet another living human after weeks of talking to a single interlocutor that didn't even respond 90% of the time, but looking at her now, you had the feral insight that this person wasn't actually human, just someone that convincingly wore the same skin as one, shrinking back under her gaze in a way that you hadn't ever since you'd left the orphanage for good.

Nope, definitely not human. Maybe lizardfolk was still on the table for the trope-bingo of your life? Not that lizardfolk was anywhere near ethereal enough to explain her immense beauty, her hair so vividly blonde that it must've passed off as one of her more important character traits. If there actually was an author that was responsible for this bullshit, you were quite sure they'd waste an entire paragraph on describing the intensity of that color and what it did to all who beheld it, praising it so much that even the most interested reader would tune out sooner or later. There was no doubt in your mind that any artist would've loved to paint her and never managed to get the pure evil that radiated off her in waves onto canvas, but your brain would have no trouble recreating a near-perfect image of her to bring it up again and again and again in your worst nightmares.

Point being: That woman was scary as fuck, yo!

You were amazed that you hadn't spontaneously shat your pants yet.

Her eyes were bright and her grin friendly, lips painted in a stunning red, but every last thing about her was so perfectly practiced that she carried an air of falsification, a sprinkle of a lie. An amazing dress flattered all of her curves, but it hurt your eyes with its green, a hue that resembled what you quickly identified as poison in every single animated kids-movie ever, and you disliked her so much that she instantly landed on top of you personal shit-list, shoving those kids that had been forcing your head down a toilet regularly back in the day on an undeserved second place.

Busy scrutinizing her appearance and unintentionally comparing her to your childhood-bullies, you didn't hear much of what she said, something about an offer, and working for her, and her name being "Handler" (What was up with parents lately?), which all went over your head. The tiny hairs on the back of your neck had risen a bit higher with every single one of her words that weren't addressed at an equal but rather the dirt beneath her shoes, and you were compulsively looking around for a viable escape route to either of her sides without coming up with any reasonable plan that could've secured you a path out of this situation.

How on earth were you supposed to run from a venus trap if it had already enwrapped you in its mouth?

Should you just kick her in the shin and make a break for it?

"No thank you," were the only words that managed to tumble out of your constricted throat, and her lie of an expression shifted slightly in response, evidently a woman better not scorned. You did not know why you were acting like this. You did not know why you hadn't just said yes and waited for a chance to run away later. The only thing you knew was that you didn't want to be anywhere near this woman that had emotions like other people had grenade launchers, and that you'd do anything to get her to fuck off.

"No, thank you? _That_ is all you have to say?!"

Her laugh was disbelieving but also positively entertained as she added: "Considering the situation you're in, you should really weigh your options a bit more carefully, don't you think? Why don't you invite me in and we continue this conversation over a nice cup of coffee? You must've missed your favorite mint blend, of course, there aren't any supermarkets around, but guess what I've-"

"I would also like you to leave my property," you interrupted, attempting to sound commanding while straightening your back.

You failed.

"Please."

The Handler must've been a lot older than you and was also much scarier than even Five in his peak levels of caffeine-withdrawal. You got so intimidated because of her flawless skin that probably hadn't sported a single pimple since she'd been born that you began stressing out, there was no way you could measure up to someone that had definitely transcended humanity at some point or another and wore a look on their face like they knew at least a hundred different ways to choke you out while simultaneously posing on the cover-page of the Vogue without breaking a sweat.

Marilyn-Monroe-but-creepy bellowed out another laugh that was more of a ridicule and singsonged: "Nothing belongs to you in this world, child, both of us know that. But as I was _trying_ to tell you: With the commission, with _us_ , you could-"

"I'm an empath, Lady," you said, "How the fuck do you expect me to kill anybody?"

And ooooh, that sounded like you _had_ overheard a bit of what she was saying. Who would've thought that you'd end up getting scouted by some weird time-traveling-assassination-company someday? Well, it wasn't like your comprehension of the offer you had just rejected did you any good, Lizardwoman got really pissed off now that you had cut her off twice and also rejected her offer with the worst possible attitude that seemed to be bitchiness at first glance but actually was just immense fear. Her emotions grew thicker, heavier, filled with so much unnatural and unfocused anger that it scared you because that was the kind of anger that cared about nothing but how to vent itself most effectively. The kind of anger that just went **BOOM**.

"Kill?"

Her teeth shone.

"Oh honey, we don't use that word. It has got quite a negative connotation over, don't you think? We prefer-"

"I'd really like you to leave now," you stated, her way of referring to herself in plural making you very uncomfortable, ignoring how you were still interrupting her despite your knowledge that she was probably pondering over whether to kill you on the spot in this very moment.

_Please leave please leave please leave please leave._

After a second of unsettling silence, her grin shifted again and now her teeth looked a lot sharper as she hissed: "Well, you were the worthless one anyway." And then someone grabbed you from behind, forcing you to your knees with so much practiced ease that it made your blood run cold and eyes widen. The woman had murderous-intent radiating off her ubiquitously, but whoever had just overpowered you didn't even particularly care about harming you, there were no feelings involved, no emotions aside from urgency to get a job done although a gloved hand was wrapped around your throat and now began squeezing the literal life out of you.

 _Woah_ , another one for the shitty-ways-to-die bingo, you did not want to be able to compare how much certain ways of kicking the bucket hurt more than others, thank you very much!

If you had been scared out of your wits earlier, you were just completely overtaxed right now, your brain stuck in such a bullshit loop of inappropriate humor that you wondered whether to moan a " _Harder daddy!_ " for good measure. You were so over the edge that you even forgot to fight back for a second. This development of events had certainly caught you off guard.

"Should I tell you something?" She-satan purred with the sick satisfaction of a child that had found another toy to play with. She rounded you with long, purposeful and admittedly very pretty strides, straight through the doorway, as she walked into a building that you considered "home" and by doing so defiled everything it stood for. You had to strain yourself to make out the words she uttered from behind you as if understanding what she was saying would help you in this situation, which it wouldn't, shit, but you still gave your best, clawing at the (single!!!) hand around your throat desperately.

"I'm glad you're too stupid to know what's good for you. He would've been a _lot_ more trouble if you had stuck around, you know? You'd almost deserve my sincere gratitude... if you weren't such a little brat."

A vein in your temple throbbed.

It took you a second to catch up with whom she was talking about, struggling against the vice-like hold around your neck uselessly before you understood that she wasn't just a threat to you, but also a threat to Five, and just _stopped_ for a second. In a belated response, your powers did something they had never done before, frantically spreading out to search for the waves of emotion that you were so accustomed to, the feelings that you adored so much, and you would've sighed in relief if it hadn't been physically impossible when you found him on the other side of town, pissy as usual, trying to get the car back to the library as fast as he could because he was ~~needlessly~~ worrying about you.

Then you realized something was wrong. His emotions were strangely stagnant, strangely unmoving. As if he had... As if everything had...

_frozen in time._

The lack of oxygen-flow towards your brain made you see stars, but you finally understood that it wasn't not only _like_ time had frozen, but that it had actually been frozen, probably by that woman that seemed to own the arrogance of a god on the same level with Zeus when Hera wasn't around. Why you were so exceptionally skilled at coming at ridiculous, novel-esque realizations like this, nobody knew, but the fact that this wasn't at all about you made your muddled thoughts clear up instantly because you did not have the luxury of dying without a care in the world anymore.

This wasn't about the empath, no. It was about the Time-traveling-guy!

Five was the actual reason for her sudden appearance, and you were only a side-dish that hadn't been to her tastes, which, fair enough, you hadn't even been the main character in your own life, but something about her wanting to get her perfectly manicured hands on _your_ more-off-than-on lover made you really, really fucking mad.

Man, why did bad guys never kill anybody quickly? Why did they give them time to get irritated and reach new, previously untapped potentials? She should've just snuffed you out and be on with it, but now that she had placed the image of a single strand of that nauseating blonde hair on his clothes in your mind... You boiled over.

From behind you, a warm breath hit the back of your ear.

"How does it feel?" she whispered. "Knowing he's going to murder a lot of people because of you?"

She was so proud of herself. Her emotions were so happy. She was so incandescently content with her actions.

"Suck a cock, lady," you wanted to say, but since there was a hand around your throat, it came out as more of a garbled groan.

Weaponizing the same aggression that had made you demolish the remains of the orphanage, wrapping it up nicely in the pending headache inside of you, placing a ribbon of rage and fear and hurt and the sheer helplessness of being dropped into an apocalypse while turning the pain that you had allowed dig into you and fester in your bones outside abruptly, you went berserk.

It was like a shockwave.

One after another, they dropped like shitty, human dominoes, clutching their heads and yelling out in agony as they got assaulted with pain so unbearable it made them bash their heads against the ground as they fell. The hold on your neck loosened and you allowed yourself to slump to the side, one hand coming up to your throat as the other rested on your stomach and you coughed and breathed and spluttered, attempting to blink the dark spots in your field of vision away, trying to get air into your lungs as fast as possible, choking around it multiple times. You felt your powers pulsate around you, devouring everything it could get its tendrils on whole, and when one of the bigger guys fell into what you assumed to be a suitcase, the greyscale of the world suddenly was no more. Everything still quiet and somewhat motionless but at least there was an asshole wind blowing against the windows again and you could sense the air shift around you as the incoming storm grew rampant.

Dying was ok as long as it didn't compromise Five's wellbeing, but now that Bitchy-mc-bitchface wanted to get her hands on him, you really had to get your depressive ass in gear.

( _What a healthy outlook on life. You should totally write a guidebook_.)

Another pulse-wave. Another synchronized groan of agony before most voices died out. You heard uncool She-satan's high heels scrape against the parquet and someone sob an apology that was way too little way too late. When you turned to look at her hunched form, you saw that she had neither puked nor immediately passed out, which meant that she must've been quite mentally resilient but also emphasized how creepy she was. Also, there were like ten new people spread all over the place, not that you counted them, you were way too out of your mind, but dragging so many guys along for 1 (one) empath and 1 (one) time traveler felt a bit like overkill even to your buzzed brain.

You admired the Handler for her tenacity before you doubled the onslaught of your powers and watched as her entire body twitched and mouth fell open in pain.

_Fucking bitch._

Doing so drained you, but it also fed the instantaneous-reward-monkey in your head so well that you questioned why you had never done it before, observing what you were doing to these assholes without the slightest sliver of sympathy or guilt welling up in your vacant eyes. Every last bit of ugly that you had bottled up in your heart came rushing out like water through a hole in a broken dam and it was immediately replaced with relief that made you dizzy. This was nice. You should keep doing this.

_Five. Go check on Five!_

After a single moment of personal (and somewhat psychopathic) enjoyment, you began throwing out the tendrils of your power in search of where you remembered Five had been earlier, stumbling out of the library like a newborn fawn that had barely evaded a kiss with a car bumper. By now, Teen-teleportation-guy had neared your position a bit, but he was still far, far away, which is why you had a bit of unusual difficulty latching onto his feelings, not that it mattered much with how comparably easy it was when it came to him.

A selfish, painfully human part of you wanted to call for help, wanted to urge him to come faster, but your love for him ran deeper as you began doing something unforgivable, began trying to alter his most cherished memories because you wanted him nowhere near her, because you wanted him to run as far as his powers carried him. It was odd, attempting to recreate what you had done to that gum-kid back then because you had actively suppressed that part of your abilities for so long. From a little bullied weakling to the monster that haunted their dreams at night. From a person he held so dear to someone he didn't hold much more than contempt for. It was odd, but also strangely familiar, and it didn't take a lot of effort, which was actually kind of concerning. You expertly shifted through his memories and forced the forged feelings inside like you hadn't ever done anything else, faltering a bit whenever your abilities brushed up against every little thing that had made him adore you, every little memory of your odd habits, every little second of love he'd wasted. There were so many moments of happiness in there, stolen memories that didn't belong in this world and hadn't really belonged in the one you left behind either, that you bit your tongue in frustration. You were deleting all of that right now. It was all going to be gone in the next second. You wouldn't leave a single breadcrumb behind.

What you did not account for though, was the fact that this headstrong, useless bond between the both of you ran deeper for whatever reason someone had scrabbled out of a broken keyboard drunk on cheap booze and useless headcanons. Instead of feeling what you wanted him to feel, Five got synchronized with your emotions, feeling what you felt in that instant, his entire bane of being syncing up with yours in literal high definition.

That's why, more than two kilometers away, eyes constricting and hands clawing into the steering wheel, Five launched into blue and out of the car as his mind tried to catch up with what was happening, as he felt those foreign emotions flash through his chest that definitely weren't his. Half-vanished into another wave of blue, he yelped out in pain as you knocked into the ground, stumbling and crashing onto his knees, both of your energies almost completely depleted as the pain you had personally provided to the Handler and her pets cut off without further ado. Your head hit the concrete of the street just when he flashed into existence just a bit closer and still too far away to make it in one jump. The impact resonated through your mind as he screamed your name in a panic. Your name. Your actual name, however he'd found out about it. The storm was raging. Sharp sand burned itself into your skin.

You realized that you had failed somehow, that he was coming, and you were fighting to stay conscious, to stay around and think about how you could save him, how you could stop them from hurting him, how you could fix another one of your mess-ups. It didn't take more than a minute until pumps in the color of that horrible woman's lipstick minced into view, and thanks to your new laceration, the only coherent thought you had was:

"My god. That bitch must look like a Christmas tree."

The Handler was saying something again. Presumably something mean. But it's not like you could hear her over the singular high pitched note and plural white-noise in your head. You felt what she felt. Obsession. Wanting to conquer and posses. Whatever she was thinking of right now, it was going to be the worst for both you and Five, because it was personal now, because she was focused. She would use you. She would use you to use him, and she'd make the both of your suffer through a fate worse than death, and that terrified you so fucking much.

You cut off the connection between you and Five and felt the dread that hit him before there was only radio silence, your weakened abilities coiling around you like a wounded animal, telling you to rest now, trying to force you into unconsciousness so they could recuperate. But adrenaline and sheer fucking willpower kept you awake, the dread piercing itself into your mind to keep your conscious or at least lucid enough to think of your next step, whatever it would end up being, a plan b, a plan z, goddamn whatever, just anything that would get you out of this mess. The ground was cold. You were bleeding. Maybe. The Handler was stepping on your throat, which must've had something to do with a personal kink, and you knew your lungs wouldn't be able to take that shit again in such a short amount of time.

Your fear of the sandstorms was gone. They somehow didn't feel very important anymore.

She-satan felt pity for you, but it was dishonest, so you told her to fuck off in your mind.

You closed your eyes and gave up.

**June 7, 2024**

**08:13**

Lying there, doing nothing and being nothing, a thought flashed through your mind with amazing accuracy, hitting you straight in the heart, however that worked anatomically, soon followed by another thought, and another, and another, and another, that made you scratch together the last bit of strength you could muster and clench your teeth, ripping your eyes wide open and reverse your state of complete defeat.

_He'd find you._

Future-Five would find you and save you from this shitfest, he would nip this stupid apocalypse and even dumber cycle of unrequited love in the bud, because your Five was so determined it was scary, because he had promised to bring you back into the past and because he always kept his promises, because you believed in him more than in anything else. He was going to find you, you just knew it. Five was going to find you and everything was going to be different because you hadn't given up this time around, because you hadn't accepted death with a feeble shrug of your shoulders. _  
_

But it wasn't going to be _you_.

It was going to be Past-you.

Blame it on being delirious, or your earlier lack of oxygen, or your lacking amount of brain cells that had been cleanly reduced to 0 by everything you had just suffered through, but this felt a welcome climax, a finale that you could live with ( ~~or rather die with haha~~ ), even if it was the peak of literal bullshit, even if it was so unfair that you wanted to cry.

You lost the coin toss.

You had never been lucky and god hated you.

Past-you would meet him again, but this time, Past-you was going to get a grip because Future-him wasn't going to be as much of a dick.

They were going to be happy, so fucking happy, and you were fine with that because it was the best possible outcome for every party involved, even if _you_ didn't get to exist anymore. Existing hadn't worked out in your favor anyway.

Using the last spark of your power that caught on with a protesting hum, you instilled the urge to kill into the Handler, a craving so familiar to her that she didn't even question it, didn't think twice whether to act on what it tempted her to do. The original message you had wanted to convey was a cheery tune along the lines of Bo Burnhams _Kill Yourself_ , somewhat of a last, idiotic attempt of rebellion that you knew wouldn't work out, and as if to sign your suspicion that the entire plane of existence hated you, the message that ended up being sent was: "Kill."

Well, shit.

The Handler (that really should've practiced how to handle her homicidal tendencies a bit better) shuddered in pleasure as the sudden compulsion to murder registered in her relatively barren emotional wasteland and pulled out a cute handgun from a pretty holster on her right leg, but it's not like you saw either or even had time to be afraid as your eyes fell shut and your breath evened out.

A second before you were entirely gone, She-devil pulled the trigger, and you didn't hear a gunshot at all until the bullet hit your forehead and there was a flash of blue that you felt more than you saw it and an arm snaked around your waist that definitely hadn't been there earlier yanked you back into familiar weightlessness.

There was no pain. No sensation. No feelings. It was strangely elongated. It hadn't been like that before, your trajectory through time never longer than the duration of a single blink. This time, you were disconnected from it all, floating in nothingness, and you were so ethereally content for a second because you didn't have to deal with that ridiculous mess anymore that you couldn't help but smile. Every card had been stacked against you from the get-go. Every day had been another form of suffering. Emotions only tired out, and hurt, and angered, and you had had to deal not only with your own but those of others as well, a power that you had not wanted and never asked for. You could hardly even deal with your own feelings after all, so who the fuck had the genius idea to put you in charge of other's? Everything was just so loud, your breath, although you must've stopped breathing, your heart, although you couldn't feel it beating, the air shifting around you and the rustling sound his clothes made when he pulled you closer and simultaneously farther away. Then, someone hit the noise cancel button, and everything got drowned out except for your name on his lips and in that sudden nothingness that was neither black nor white there were no powers, no migraine, no sign of a pending headache, a concept that was entirely foreign to you since pain was more of an afterthought in your mind, always around, fluctuating but never fully dying out.

You felt yourself shut off with a guttural scream ringing out somewhere next to you, somewhere _in_ you, and something in you very calmly realized that it was time to let go now.

**???**

**???**

...

...

...

Surprise, surprise, you did not let go.

Being the stubborn and very resentful piece of shit that you were, you kept holding on by a tiny margin, clutching life and all of its hideous facets so closely to your chest you almost felt it resonating inside of your ribcage, oddly synchronized to your frantic heartbeat as if both were completely interchangeable with one another.

You should've probably lied and come up with the most profound explanation that heroically underlined why you valiantly decided to fight death, why you _chose_ to hold on even despite all the adversity that this fuckhead of a higher being had decided to throw at you, but the actual reason that kept you anchored to everything was that one dumbass song that you didn't even like that much anymore, ringing out in your head, echoing in your soul, a husky male voice urging a boy to go running much more often than anybody should ever be running in your opinion, a song that made you fucking want to get up and break into a sprint even despite your obstinate aversion against sports and the fact that you weren't sure if you even had legs right now.

For a tiny second longer, you held on to your body, held on to the feelings you hated and loved and breathed in, and apparently, that second was more than enough, because Teen-teleportation-guy did something, _that thing_ , maybe, and then your head knitted itself back together which was _gross gross gross_ , and you were floating, floating until he couldn't hold on anymore, floating away to god knows where, which is how you realized why Future-him had been so cold and distant, you got how he'd think he'd killed you after he literally lost his grip on your soul, that must've been such an awkward moment.

_Run, boy, run!_

You weren't particularly sure if you were doing the time-travel-thing or the dying-thing, which is why your last thought probably should've been a bit more depressed, but you oddly felt like you had done a single thing right in your life and thus fully enjoyed that moment of weightlessness, relishing in the peace it brought you, bathing in it with tenacity that had become an extension of yourself at some point of your life that you hadn't quite registered.

 _Man_ , you thought, _Future-him and Past-me are gonna do this all so much better than Present-him and Present-me did.  
_

_Who knows. They might even end up going on a date._

**September 22, 2019**

**16:58**

Ah, great.

As soon as you and your body were united again, you got a fucking headache, which really made you regret your earlier decision in about 2.3 seconds flat.

_Thanks god! Douche-nugget! Don't come down here because I WILL attempt deicide!_

Rubbing your temples, you heaved a deep breath and stretched out your back, which still existed, huh, every singly bone in your body feeling like it had been pulverized, snorted by some starlet, shat out and super-glued back together. For a solid second, you weren't sure which side "up" was, checking whether all your limbs were where they were supposed to be.

So, ironically, you much preferred being shot in the head over being shot in the heart, which might've had something to do with the fact that you were kind of used to odd pressure and pain up in your brain thanks to your migraines, or the fact that you barely had any time to register pain before your brain was already shutting down, or the fact that you had been very high in whatever state you had been before you had ended up wherever you were now, but mostly led back to worrying about a hole in your body being a lot easier if said hole wasn't located in the part of you that was tasked with worrying.

You were disoriented, this time in a body bigger than you recalled it being, also a body that was less worn out and better fed somehow, a body that — your hand had immediately shot out to check — definitely sported that stupid tiny hideous scar on top of the left eyebrow.

You never thought you could be so stupidly happy about that monstrosity

So you sat there, somewhat anticlimactically, god knows when but at least in the good old bustling street of The City, filled with people and life and sounds and you just ate your fill on the colors and voices and lane-jumping assholes that would've annoyed any previous version of you half to death ( _bad choice of words_ ). You weren't quite **THERE** yet, and pretty exhausted, which is why you didn't jump up and begun a random victory dance right there on the sidewalk, but you knew you weren't dead, that this was neither afterlife nor imagination because you either were faster to the uptake than anybody else or just repressed the unnecessary most of the time. You were alive. You were back. Not quite "home" yet, but almost there. People were around again. You wanted to check on your apartment and the orphanage and most of all the academy, but your legs wouldn't move, so you had to be content with watching random pedestrians do random things.

Yeah. That guy just picked his nose. Ew.

Of course, there was a lot of mental and emotional damage you would have to sort through later, especially that of the last hour or so, _oof_ , that would be a lot to unpack, killing yourself via proxy was something you definitely did NOT want to deal with anytime soon, but this was kind of a nice day. The sun was shining. Buildings were standing. Even birds were singing. You were ok, for now, really ok. There was nothing to think about so you just sat there and _looked_.

It was weird. You had been dying — again — just a minute prior, but it all felt like a distant dream at this point.

“Hope you’re comfortable," drawled out a pissed voice beneath you, but his fucking emotions betrayed him so hard you didn't even bother reacting to that obvious bit of bait.

Never the right time, never the right place, but suddenly the man whose voice was now chiding your for being heavy wasn't Future-five, or Past-five, or Drunk-five, just Your-Five, and you instantly slumped down against him, the warmth of his chest, the warmth of his adoration and relief, and all these emotions were so bittersweet because underlying them was still the horror of having lost you. _Twice_. Damn.

(What were the chances of ending up manifesting in his lap again? At this point, you were more than ready to just call it "fate.")

You tried to keep a straight face and failed miserably as he sat up and enveloped you in a hug, immediately beginning to sob against his collarbone since you still weren't quite **THERE** yet, back from a possible future that had drained you more than you had let yourself realize, in his arms, in the fluffy pink cloud of his unconditional adoration, not lying in a puddle of your own blood that reflected the most atrocious fucking shoes you had ever seen. There were people now. People being dicks. People going somewhere. People with plushies (mostly kids but who cared about semantics). Just fucking living people, and holy shit, if that wasn't a marvelous sight, an entirely old yet foreign concept. You cried and cried and he held you, clutched you to him desperately, head placed atop yours as you just vented all the emotions that had kept you trapped these past few months (that actually never really happened due to time-travel shenanigans, yikes), and for the first time in a long while, your empathy concentrated fully on you, flowing around you carefully, placatingly, as if it, too, had been scared of losing you.

He'd found you again, and it was you for real this time. If you needed to believe in destiny, you at least did not want to believe that it had decided to fuck you over. You liked what he felt was right much more. That the universe had balled you up and shipped you to him because you were every emotion it had violently beaten down in him, a bit like a gift basket with a "sorry" note attached to it. It was so poetic. You didn't notice that your traitorous sons of bitches of a power relayed your adoration right back to him. The strain on his shoulders slightly eased with every single wave of your love for him.

A lot of people were weirded-out. More of them thought the both of you were an inconvenience, and some odd one's out — there's always weirdoes — thought the both of you were adorable and found a little happiness through watching you embrace like that in the middle of a busy sidewalk as if you hadn't seen each other for months. As if you were part of some cheesy romantic comedy.

In all actuality, these two versions of you had never met before, but no one needed to know that and the two of you needed not to care for it.

It was just _you_ and _him_ , without any distracting additions to either pronoun.

When your sobs finally died down, you did not look up from your secure position against him, although you probably should've asked where he ended up. Where he had been in the last minute of your life, which must've been years to him, which was still a very odd concept to get used to, this time-travel thing was too smart for you. You should've asked if the handler got him, how he had returned, whether he had missed you. There were about a thousand things that either of you could've or should've said, but instead, what he wanted to know was:

"Why would you lie about being named Dolores?"

And that had you howling out in laughter although it wasn't even that funny.

"Holy shit," you gasped, "I forgot about that. You fell for someone that's named Dolores. What kind of kink is that."

You were way too loud. People were shooting you glances. You did not give a flying fuck.

"To be fair, you were the only living being in ALL the miles."

"There were enough mannequins to last you for a lifetime," you shot back. "Did you cheat on me with one of them? Don't lie, I know when you lie!"

"I thought you couldn't read my thoughts?"

"I can, now!"

"Ok then," he relented, "I definitely cheated on you with a mannequin. It was so much kinder to me and very happy to share the sofa without complaining about its inadequate size once."

"Did it complain about another ... _inadequate size_ though?"

"That's exactly what I'm talking about, you have a severe lack of empathy!"

"My empathy figuratively saved your ass!"

"My time-traveling _literally_ saved your ass! Twice!"

"Your time-traveling got my ass in trouble in the first place!"

"Your ass wouldn't have been in trouble if you had just left me alone!"

"It's a very nice ass, though."

"It is."

"I'll drink to that," then after pondering a second, "A coffee. Black."

He chuckled against your hair breathlessly and you could've blanketed yourself in what he was feeling right now, pressing your skin against as much of his as you could get in public without being overly indecent, although you didn't care much for the rules and convictions of society anymore, which might be an aftermath of the doomsday-thing, or some remnant of your rebellious teenaged punk-phase. One arm was snaked around his hip beneath his shirt, the other holding on to his arm beneath the sleeve as you pressed your cheek into his. He was brushing his knuckles against your jaw, which made you tilt your head up towards him and hold your breath instinctively.

God, it all felt so unreal now, like it never happened. Like you and this man knew each other from another life and had accidentally run into each other, realizing you were soulmates just by the way you fit together.

What did you know, this might've been an entirely different universe (that sure felt a lot like home) for all that mattered. But as long as he was here with you, you'd be fine. So you sat there. In the middle of one of the busiest streets in The City, in his lap, chatting with each other as if you had accidentally encountered one another on a totally normal day.

"Empath, huh?" he hummed, placing his chin back atop your head although you had been readying yourself for a kiss, and you did not expect him to be so severely out of character as he added: "Does that mean you get horny if I get horny?"

And then you were just kind of wheezing into him as he held you, with a lightheartedness that never seemed acceptable in the burnt down version of this world but now seemed as natural as breathing.

You had each other. Finally. At last.

The rest wouldn't be all that difficult to figure out.

**A looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time after that**

**like a REALLY long time holy shit**

**21:00  
**

When Five begrudgingly roped you into saving the world because of a lot of convoluted incidentalities (and your incessant nagging), you got to meet his siblings (whose previous deaths were the reason that past him had been 600% less sibling and 100% more edge), each one a different kind of unexpected than the latter, which created such a jarring combination of different first impressions that you needed a full ten minutes of ponder-time until you finally gathered enough input to construct a preliminary stat-sheet on all of them.

Luther was grinning awkwardly, very tall and very, very broad, dwarvening anybody else in the room with his sheer unbelievable size that he attempted to hide with hunched over shoulders and ridiculous clothes. Allision, the woman who had her arm interlocked with his and tried to coax him into an upright stance, was breathtaking, donning a crowd-pleasing smile that might've held an ounce of confusion which she expertly hid from plain sight and the nicest dress you had ever seen in your life. Diego, the guy who was glaring at you from a corner, was intimidating, dark and broody, but less threatening than he appeared at first sight, soon staring at you open-mouthedly when Five pressed a whisper of a kiss to your cheek (as he stealthily advised you to dodge if Klaus made an attempt at hugging you), evidently gobsmacked by your sole existence, and he was the first one of them that had any resemblance to Five just because of the glare. Klaus, of course, immediately went in for the hug, and Five had to actively keep you from reciprocating it because you instantly felt a connection to that unusual guy, especially empathy-wise when you saw the mess of his that wasn't all that different from your own. That personified stalk of asparagus wore something that could only be described as twin-dress to Allison's, looking just as dashing as she did in a very different and strangely similar way. He leaned over Five's outstretched arm, grinning amicably as he told you that Ben was fucking _ecstatic_ to finally get another person capable of impulse-control into the group, whereafter you shot him a diplomatic smile, kicking Five in the shin for his snort, not at all cluing the prior in on the fact that your lack of impulse-control literally added years of trauma to their little brother's expansive track-record.

The last one who got introduced to you was Vanya, a timid but very likable woman looked at Five's smile and the arm snaked around your hips like she couldn't quite decide which one weirded her out more. Settling on observing you with a very displaced expression, she actually ended up becoming the first one you actually exchanged a few sentences with since the others were a bit unclear on how to approach you and Klaus' every attempt got thwarted.

Even without your empathy cluing you in on how she began adoring you after 1 second flat, you thought that _yeah_ , _ok_. You'd get along just fine.


End file.
